HARARE – A Delta Beverages machine operator dismissed after a breathalyser-style test showed he was drunk on the job has cleared a hurdle in his fight to get his job back, after the Supreme Court ruled that his case belongs before the Labour Court.
Mufaro Muchetu, who operated machinery in the packaging department at Delta’s Southerton plant in Harare, was dismissed after the company found him working under the influence of alcohol on November 8, 2024. He was tested at the end of his shift and, Delta said, recorded a high blood alcohol concentration.
The brewer treated it as a safety matter: a man in charge of machinery, and in no state to be, put himself and his colleagues at risk. Muchetu was charged under Delta’s 2003 Employment Code of Conduct, convicted in the company’s disciplinary hearing and shown the door.
He appealed to the Works Council, and there came an unexpected turn. Muchetu did not contest the drinking. He accepted responsibility but asked for a lighter penalty, citing personal challenges.
The council was unmoved. It found he had breached the company’s workplace alcohol policy and behaved unprofessionally, and it upheld the dismissal.
Muchetu then went to the Labour Court, arguing that the disciplinary authorities had not properly weighed his mitigation and should have given him a final warning instead of the sack.
Delta hit back on a technicality. The Labour Court, it said, had no power to hear the matter because Muchetu had not first appealed to a labour officer under section 101(5) of the Labour Act. When that argument did not carry the day, the company took it to the Supreme Court.
It lost. The apex court dismissed Delta’s appeal with costs, ruling that a worker aggrieved by a decision made under a registered employment code can go straight to the Labour Court under section 92D.
The two routes, the judges said, do different jobs. Section 101(5), they explained, “creates a gateway to the conciliation process by a labour officer,” and is not a way of overturning a finished disciplinary decision.
The court added that the two provisions “provide redress to an aggrieved party who may choose to employ one or the other of the two remedies.”
It also drew a firm line around what labour officers can do.
“A labour officer does not have any jurisdiction under section 93 to entertain a matter once a determination on the merits has been made through a disciplinary process under a registered code of conduct,” the court said.
The ruling settles nothing about whether Muchetu should have been dismissed. The Supreme Court dealt only with the legal route open to him. Whether the sack was too harsh for a worker who owned up will now be for the Labour Court to decide.
Source: ‘Drunk’ Delta Beverages worker wins Supreme Court right to be heard – Zimbabwe News Now
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