In the world of work, class differences, created mostly by poor working conditions and low pay for the blue collar workers are a thorny issue that causes concern for both the worker and the labour movement. Choppies Group is a high-profit making retail company operating 58 retail outlets in Southern Africa, with 49 stores in Botswana with 3, 900 employees. Its prospectus shows that by the year ended June 2011, Choppies made P124 million in profits after tax. You would expect workers of this company to have glittering tales. But a cashier at one of the 49 stores, speaking on anonymity, paints a grotesque picture. She says though they toil from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., serving endless streams of customers, the moneymaking chain store pays its workers peanuts. "You won't believe that the packers earn about P700, while we cashiers earn P900. On the other hand, our supervisors make about P3, 000," she says. She also says as you go up the chain store, an assistant manger earns about P6, 000, whilst a store manager walks away with P7, 000 per month. Conversely, those at the top of the Choppies pay structure pocket as much as P500, 000 a month. According to the prospectus, Choppies Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ramachandran Ottapathu earned more than P5 million whilst Choppies deputy chairman Farouk Ismail reaped about P5.6 million in salaries and bonuses during the period under review. This means in a month, Ismail pocketed about half a million Pula every month while the CEO took about P443, 000 in a month. Juxtaposed with a shop-floor assistant's salary, which stands at around P700, it becomes immediately clear that the disparity between those at the bottom of the retailer and those at the top is staggering.
The Choppies situation is a microcosm of what happens in the Botswana job market and the entire world where the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" has remained wide as the skilled personnel gets more salaried than the unskilled. This has created a lot of social problems as the poor struggle even to buy food and other essentials for the family. "Most of us even suffer a lot because as a result of my low salary, I have to rent a cheap house in Mogoditshane where I pay P350, which gobbles up almost half my salary. So from the remainder I have to ensure that I pay for transport to work, food, clothes and emergencies," says one Choppies employee. She says that renting accommodation in Mogoditshane can be dangerous especially for people who knock off as late as 8 p.m.
One evening after alighting from a combi, she was ambushed by thugs who grabbed her cellular phone, handbag and also beat her up, leaving her with a blue eye. "The next day when I told my boss about the situation and said I would come late for work the next day because I had to go to the clinic, he simply told me that he would deduct my earnings for the time that I would be away," she says.
