Fed up with unpaid wages, salaries that are below the poverty line, few jobs available in the formal sector and a proposed wage freeze, Zimbabwe workers took to the streets in six cities Saturday to demand workers be paid and to petition the government to not arbitrarily change the labor law to empower employers to fire workers.
Workers rallied in cities across Zimbabwe Saturday. Credit: Thando Khoza
Carrying signs reading “Worker rights are human rights,” and “This year, we are not backing down,” workers presented government officials with a petition demanding officials honor their pledge to create 2 million jobs and rethink the introduction of so-called labor market flexibility, in which the brunt of economic reform falls on workers. (Read the full petition.)
“Senior government officials, including the minister of finance, want to turn the worker into a form of cheap labor,” Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) President George Nkiwane said at the rally. “While it is the ordinary worker that is being made to suffer, the government is not taking any meaningful action on chief executives who are bleeding the economy by paying themselves huge salaries and perks.”
Wages average less than $250 a month—for the 30 percent of the population working in the formal economy—while the cost of living is as high as in New York City. Some 72 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2013. Increasing numbers of Zimbabweans are forced to seek a living in informal economy jobs like street vending, in which they have no income security and few, if any, social benefits like health care.
“We used to have over 1.5 million workers in the formal sector 10 years ago, but we would be lucky if we have 700,000 in the formal sector (today),” Nkiwane said.
Women are disproportionately represented in poor-paying informal economy jobs, and young workers in urban areas also lack jobs that pay a living wage, the ZCTU petition noted. Employers also increasingly subcontract dangerous jobs, and so avoid paying compensation to workers injured or made ill while on the job, the petition stated.
Fake press releases and pamphlets were distributed in advance of the rally, falsely stating the rallies had been cancelled. Credit: ZCTU
Protestors turned out in Bulawayo, Chinhoyi, Gweru, Harare, Masvingo and Mutare despite a campaign to fool workers into thinking the rally had been cancelled. Fake press releases and pamphlets, purportedly from ZCTU, were distributed in several cities in advance of the rally, telling workers it had been canceled.
The march took place in an increasingly threatening environment for activists. Last month, Itai Dzamara, a leading pro-democracy advocate, was abducted. He remains missing, and leading civil society organizations—including the ZCTU—are calling on the government to ascertain his whereabouts and prosecute his abductors.
Police in the cities of Bulawayo, Mutare and Masvingo initially refused to grant permission for the demonstrations, but reversed their decisions after the Harare police agreed to allow the demonstration there, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
Swaziland’s union movement cancelled a planned rally over the weekend after concerns the police would break up the gathering as they have multiple times in the past several weeks. In February and March, large numbers of police disbanded meetings of the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA), injuring at least one union leader.
Two weeks ago, the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) gathered for a prayer service, when a large number of police showed up and sought to disrupt the event, physically injuring the union’s secretary general in the process, according to union leaders. Union members refused to be intimidated and carried on their service, say union leaders, adding that the government is increasingly prohibiting workers from meeting or publicly speaking out.
“The government of the Kingdom of Swaziland has really ensured that the country is viewed as a democracy only in name … as it continues to crush any get-together organized by TUCOSWA,” says TUCOSWA Secretary General Vincent Ncongwane.
Workers also are enduring large-scale job loss, with 850 textile workers laid off last month, the latest in mass firings targeting in the garment sector.
Ncongwane notes that on April 12, 1973, Swaziland banned political parties. Forty-five years later, when Swazi workers sought to commemorate “the day democracy died in Swaziland,” workers again were denied their fundamental democratic rights.
“Imagine the lack of logic of denying workers the right to discuss issues of democracy, among other things, simply at the instruction of a regional commissioner of police and not because of any violation of any law but because of a misplaced fear that would be dangerous for the country,” Ncongwane says. “That makes our country so fragile.”
The 2014 U.S. State Department human rights report cited serious human rights violations in Swaziland, including arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government or its agents; severely restricted freedom of assembly, including violence against protestors; jailing of trade union leaders; the deregistration of TUCOSWA and the banning of strikes.
“We have seen numerous countries being changed, and drastically, so when the tide starts to turn against suppression, Swaziland cannot be the exception,” Ncongwane says.
TUCOSWA is now planning a May 1 public event, and is seeking a court order allowing the action to take place.
In June 2014 the U.S. government took the rare step of suspending African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade benefits for Swaziland, citing the Swazi government’s systematic violations of fundamental worker rights, including refusal to legally recognize TUCOSWA. Swaziland’s trade unions support AGOA, but maintain that the country must meet benchmarks of the agreement, which include respecting human rights and labor rights.
After thousands of Peruvian workers took to the streets on Thursday, the Peruvian government backed off a proposal (Supreme Decree 4008) that would have made it easier for employers to conduct mass layoffs. The proposed legislation also would have allowed employers to provide wage increases, up to 20 percent, in the form of bonuses which are not included in calculating benefits, and it would have limited the Labor Ministry’s oversight.
Spearheaded by the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP), the action led to workers’ second big victory this year. In December, young workers mobilized up to 30,000 workers and their allies in a series of marches protesting a new law that reduced salaries and benefits for workers under age 25. Lawmakers repealed the law in January.
Still on the books is a law passed in December that makes it easier for companies to conduct mass layoffs if they show two consecutive months of financial losses. This legislation, Supreme Decree 013, allows employers to eliminate 10 percent of their workforce if they can meet stipulated criteria—a loophole that empowers employers to target trade unionists, pregnant women, workers suffering from occupational safety and health illnesses and older workers. CGTP leaders, who met last week with the National Labor Council, say they are making progress in discussions to amend the law, and are meeting with the Prime Minister today.
Union leaders say worker awareness, mobilization and union-driven proposals for labor law reform are key to passing measures to improve workers’ standard of living, beat back regressive labor reforms and create the conditions for regaining union density and decent work in Peru.
The union movement plans further rallies and strikes in coming months, with public-sector workers set to mobilize for their rights on Wednesday.
In July 2013, the government passed a new civil service law that eliminated the right of more than 500,000 public administration workers to collectively negotiate salaries, narrows the definition of the type of unions they could establish and prevents “essential service” unions from striking (without defining essential services).
Public employees say the law violates International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 151 that protects the right of public-sector workers to form unions. They are seeking to raise their case at Committee on Application of Norms in the annual ILO conference in June 2014. All four confederations are formally coordinating to take the issue to the meeting, and together with the global union Public Services International, the Solidarity Center is working to prepare the labor delegates for a united front to advocate on this key Peruvian labor issue at the ILO.
Extortion and bribery fueled the forced labor behind Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest in autumn 2014, a coerced mass mobilization that took teachers, health care workers and millions of other employees away from their duties for several weeks, according to a report released today by the nonprofit Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights.
While fewer children were pushed into the fields during the most recent harvest, the study found an unprecedented degree of extortion of individuals and businesses that included keeping people in fields even though there was no more cotton to pick so that workers had to continue to pay for room and board, and the setting of unattainable quotas so people had to pay to make up deficits.
“The Government’s Riches, the People’s Burden,” which builds on the Uzbek-German Forum’s preliminary findings last November, reports that the government mobilized more public employees in the 2014 harvest than in previous years, likely to make up for fewer child laborers. Uzbekistan has cut back on the use of child labor in the cotton fields, following worldwide condemnation—including by the U.S. State Department, which in October placed Uzbekistan among 12 countries with the worst forms of child labor.
“Students and the sick suffer during the harvest time,” says Nadejda Atayeva, president of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia. “Schools and health clinics cannot function with so many staff sent to pick cotton. Students cannot receive the quality of education that they deserve, and medical care is inaccessible to people, even when they are very ill.”
At least 17 people died and numerous people were injured as a result of the cotton harvest and poor or unsafe working and living conditions, according to the report, which details how workers were forced to toil long hours picking cotton in unsafe and unhealthy working conditions that often included no access to clean drinking water. Workers were forced to live in garages, unused farm buildings or local schools in crowded and unsanitary conditions often without heat or hot water, even during cold weather at the end of the season.
The annual cotton harvest, estimated to exceed $1 billion, disappears into an extra-budgetary fund in the Finance Ministry to which only the highest-level officials have access, the report states.
“The enrichment of officials creates a powerful disincentive to enact real reforms of the cotton sector, and unlawful practices undermine the rule of law, nurturing an environment in which the government denies its use of forced labor and impunity prevails,” the report’s authors write.
The report concludes with specific recommendations for governments and nongovernmental organizations to address Uzbekistan’s abuses of human rights, including investigating and prosecuting companies that benefit from or contribute to the forced labor system of cotton production, which is in violation of international and national laws.
Experienced Uzbek-German Forum monitors, fluent in Uzbek, researched the cotton harvest and labor practices in the capital, Tashkent, and in six regions in Uzbekistan.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) will take to the streets in six cities on Saturday to protest economic stagnation and an increasingly repressive environment for workers, civil society activists and human rights defenders.
Over the years, the ZCTU has tracked the steady decline in the country’s economic situation and its widening informal economy—where more than 80 percent of Zimbabweans work for irregular pay or no pay at all. And it has decried the ever-dwindling number of formal jobs: down by nearly 10,000 positions in 2013 and more than 5,000 in 2014, according to its calculations.
As the economy sputters, the government is threatening to cut wages, pushing to gut the country’s labor laws and blaming workers for the country’s terrible economic situation.
The march will take place in an increasingly threatening environment for activists. Last month Itai Dzamara, a leading pro-democracy advocate, was abducted. He remains missing, and leading civil society organizations—including the ZCTU—are calling on the government to ascertain his whereabouts and prosecute his abductors.
Police in the cities of Bulawayo, Mutare and Masvingo initially refused to grant permission for the demonstrations, but reversed their decisions after the Harare police agreed to allow the demonstration there, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
In 2010, an International Labor Organization (ILO) commission found serious government interference in ZCTU meetings and demonstrations in violation of ILO Convention 87 on freedom of association and Convention 98 on collective bargaining. The ITUC notes that while the government pledged to the ILO that police and security forces would receive training and education to prevent such violations in the future, the interference continues.
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