via Government reviews labour laws 7 July 2014
INDUSTRY and Commerce minister Mike Bimha has revealed that government was reviewing labour laws to make them more flexible and applicable to the current operating environment.
Addressing members of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Industry and Commerce in Harare last week, Bimha said the current legislation had contributed significantly towards company closures as they were not compatible with the new environment.
“One of the areas that l think we need to address and l think government is addressing is all issues about our labour legislation. I think there have been concerns that our labour legislations are very rigid where it shouldn’t be, there is need for flexibility, particularly in the difficult times that we are in,” he said.
For a company facing challenges, it will be difficult to retrench. The process has to get approval from the Ministry of Labour which sometimes takes a long time when the company is already bleeding. By the time such approval is granted, the company would have long folded.
“. . . government is seized with this matter of making sure that we review our labour legislation to be in line with what we want to achieve,” Bimha said.
Bimha said it was possible for some of the companies under judicial management to be resuscitated, but there was need for the government to create an enabling environment apart from sourcing for funding.
He said his ministry was currently identifying key players in various cities particularly those companies that ceased to operate due to lack of working capital, modern equipment and technology.
“Because some of them are probably out of sync with the modern trends, the technology is no longer of any benefit and probably you would want to come up with a new technology all together, but we need to continuously analyse what we have and assist those that we can assist, particularly those which have got a potential of being run well,” he said
According to the 2014 National Budget statement, Finance and Economic Development minister Patrick Chinamasa said government had consented to the need to review the country’s existing labour laws which tend to be skewed in favour of employees without taking due cognisance of productivity and the capacity of companies to pay.
COMMENTS
Typical of this government who always wait until they have to take action. Who knows if we had a more conducive labour environment fewer workers would have lost their jobs because their companies were forced to close. Interestingly the question of productivity is never addressed. Until such time that government provides an enabling environment, companies pay a liveable wage & workers produce at an optimum level will we make the necessary progress.
Any reviews should not reverse good gains employees got after independence and should not create slave working conditions as elsewhere in the region. It should also no be done with a motive to benefit individually as quite a number of the black elite are now entrepreneurs.
We don’t want to blame whites for being oppressors and then turn ourselves into a different kind of oppressors.
These archaic labour laws, crafted in the ‘stalinist, socialist, communist’ 1980’s, have no place in the current 21st century economic environment. They were drafted then by govt, to get ‘white’ business to keep the majority in employment and today the same govt is scratching its head and wondering, WTF do we do with these terrible laws. Get rid of them, sooner rather than later.
This shows that these greedy ministers, as new employers, do not want to pay where they were forcing the whites to pay. They destroyed that vibrant economy by greed, the same people now want to punish the workers. Surely mabhunu were a better devil than these ministers/employers.
Hey Big Daddy Chikos, your brothers and sisters already are oppressing the millions of struggling Zimbos, there is mass poverty and hunger and desperation caused by none other than our comrades stupid, selfish backward policies, designed to benefit a few…..this is not what the liberation movement was fought for….it was to set us free, to give us freedom of choice, to give we the people of Zimbabwe of all tribal and racial persuasions PEACE AND PROSPERITY!!!!!!!!something we have not received….Lets pray to the Lord Almighty to deliver our nation….to give us true freedom, peace and prosperity…