Zimbabwe formal and informal workers in the struggle to draw cash from banks
Today’s Zimbabwe is no place for anyone with work skills and abilities to seek employment and hope to sustain an average let alone basic standard of living.
Twenty years down memory lane the virtues of being formally employed were uppermost drivers of deliberate action by Zimbabweans. Not any longer. Zimbabwean salaries and wages have been transformed from individual assets to individual liabilities.
The workplace has been transformed from a friendly and healthy social networking platform with immense opportunities for realising economic gains to a hazardous death trap for anyone who dares trudge into it.
Formal employment is in this context defined as the written and unwritten contract between business entities and individuals to engage in joint activities aimed at producing and retailing goods and services wherein the business undertakes to pay individuals contracted to it a regular salary or wage for services rendered to it.
In Zimbabwe such contracts are principally regulated by the Labour Relations Act 28:01 (LRA). This principal statute is buttressed by Common Law principles and various other area specific statutes such as the Finance Act, The Public Service Act, The Marriages Acts, The Pensions and Provident Fund Act, The Workers Compensation Act, The National Social Security Act and the Citizenship Act to name but a few.
The LRA makes any relationship between an employer and employee, written or otherwise, that has subsisted for three consecutive months duly formalised and enforceable at law via structured and hierarchical quasi-judicial institutions from the shop flow up to fully judicial structures like the Labour Court, High Court and Supreme Court.
As a general rule all disputes in labour matters on issues of merits must be resolved by the Labour Court if they are to be considered to have exhausted domestic remedies by the High Court necessitating its intervention.
Even then the High Court reluctantly intervenes in purely labour disputes when given compelling reasons to do so.
Any disputes on a question of law that arises after a Labour Court can be referred to the Supreme Court for final determination of the legal principle in dispute.
In this framework where Zimbabweans must first be contracted to work, remunerated periodically as evidence of the subsistence of the employment contract and formally terminated if the relationship has to end, workers are victims of trials and tribulations that hardly ever make headline news unless they are politically well positioned or connected.
The failure to highlight worker issues and prod proactive jurisprudence in Labour laws resulted in immense powers devolving to Trade Union officials with better insight in workplace regulation.
Many formal workers trust their Trade Union representative more than they do the Human Resources expert and or their local political leader.
It is that trust that has been cleverly exploited by the MDC when it mutated into a political party and the reason behind the loyalty of its support.
The swell in its support base is directly linked to the hardships associated with securing and retaining formal employment in the country and the attendant economic deprivation it has caused on many Zimbabweans.
In the agro-based economy where between 60-80% of the country’s population lived on informal subsistence agricultural enterprise financed by between 20-40% formally employed people it was always coming that as the employed found it more and more difficult to finance their day to day living requirements the swell of discontent would suck in the informal sector and subsistence peasant farmers as financial support from workers dried up.
The scarcity of formal work opportunities pushed many aspiring workers into informal and in many insistences illegal means of sustaining a livelihood.
The government did not do itself a service by indulging in an unplanned Land acquisition programme which was morally justified but economically suicidal as it further curtailed formal employment opportunities in the largest employment sector of commercial agriculture and downstream industries.
Land ownership without adequate finance to make it productive and self sustaining resulted in food insecurity for the country and increased discontent with the government whose many functionaries had benefited from the proceeds of the repossessed farmlands.
Even the beneficiaries of the land redistribution initiative who had lost formal jobs and thought they would use land ownership to compensate for their lost income generating capacity as employees found that being cash strapped landlords was not the remedy they desired and joined the landless in grieving against the government.
The government was forced to indulge in quasi-fiscal activities it did not have cash resources to fund. It resorted to printing money to finance the waning commercial agricultural fortunes of the country but with many beneficiaries of the farms being committed top civil servants and party loyalists, it appeared the government was rewarding its cronies.
The financial assistance from printed money did not yield positive results in improved agricultural productivity and with the government having severed economic links with traditional Western financial backers, inflation ran riot when outputs could not fetch enough to offset inputs costs.
The central figure in all this- the worker- was being ignored by politicians focused on scoring international political points through sanctions and sovereignty contests the country was always destined to lose.
Worker wages were corroded by inflation. Workplace health and safety issues were relegated to backstage politics of patronage. Critical compliance and enforcement rules and regulations to guarantee workplace and environmental safety were suspended.
Garbage collection was politicised and removed from local authority control in politically motivated private contract awards.
A cursory glance at escalators and multi storey building lifts and industrial conveyor belts will show that these critical public health threats were last inspected and government tested no later than 1990 when most of the antiquated machinery driving them has a maximum 5 year safe use guarantee.
Workers and the public must use these antiquated equipment at own risk to personal safety.
Hazardous, toxic waste and raw sewage has been known to be released into main urban water supply reservoirs resulting in sporadic pandemics of waterborne diseases the latest of which has so far officially claimed more than 1200 lives.
With curtailed incomes most of which are insufficient for a single return trip to their workplaces it defies logic that the formally employed workers still find the motivation and energy to wake up every workday to expose themselves to the dangers in their work places.
What is not manifest is that these formal workers are motivated by illegal informal work opportunities that devolve to them from their formal workplaces including opportunities to nick any utility they can lay hands on from employers preoccupied in equally illegal initiatives to raise funding for operations.
But unsuspecting formal workers are paying a heavy price for their dishonesty in presenting themselves for work and using their time there to engage in non work related informal activities.
The pathetic salaries and wages they are paid are commensurate with the effort they put towards their employers’ formal activities.
Most workers are unable to save any of their incomes as they are not sufficient to cover current day to day living needs.
They are however compelled to contribute 3% of their gross income to the National Social Security Pension Fund and in many instances up to 10% of their gross salaries to the Employer’s Group Pension Fund.
When they retire or resign these are the only funds likely to be at their disposal for use in old age.
But they won’t count for much after inflation has taken its toll on their pensions.
Those that find the going hard and quit employment can opt to withdraw their contributions and accrued interest less income tax.
With a guaranteed 5% compound interest against a 231million% official inflation rate they are none the better off.
But it is the displaced employees that seek refuge in the diaspora and those unfortunate enough to face dismissal or forced severance of employment contracts that are in the invidious position of learning to live life under the informal work environment that are at the greatest risk.
With the cover of employment blown they have to go full blown informal traders in what is termed the Black market.
It is an illegal market for trading anything from forex to drugs, minerals, used and used goods.
Many of these tradable commodities are sourced from hard core and ruthless criminals and attract the attention of a depraved and corrupt Police Force.
Those that are legally or illegally dismissed are forced to wait for ages as their severance packages are contested in the judicial process that can take over a decade to conclude and by the time their cases are concluded their claims will be worth nothing thanks to a highly conservative jurisprudence that is impervious to economic developments and politicians whose interests are in rhetorical than practical solution of problems for people they purport to represent.
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