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May Day may be a fairly quiet holiday but it is a very important one as it concentrates minds on the position of workers within the economy and the need to ensure that their contribution is recognised.
Their rights and expectations are also taken into account.
President Mnangagwa set the tone with his statement on the eve of the public holiday, that the workers are an essential part of the economic growth through their production and productivity, and their importance cannot be minimised. Without the workers there is no production and they are entitled to their fair share of the wealth their efforts produce.
The Government is the largest employer, and runs almost all the essential services that the rest of us need to produce and to work, so as Head of Government he renewed his commitment that conditions of service will be continually improved within the State sector.
There are obvious limits to just how fast remuneration can be raised and the non-monetary benefits can be implemented and increased. We are not going to print money, or even borrow money, to pay civil servants more since that just leads to economic challenges.
But as the economy grows the tax revenue grows and so more can be done each year to improve the conditions of State workers. The Government, within its fiscal discipline that is now so essential, has maintained the percentage of revenue spent on staff, and maintained it as the largest item in the budget, so economic growth automatically means more can be spent.
The commitment by the President not to take State workers for granted and to maintain the policy of continual improvement as the economy grows is, therefore, important. He recognises their essential input and he wants to treat them fairly.
The President also made his appeal to the private sector, which employs considerably more people than the State, even with the growth of self-employment, to again follow a similar policy of continual improvement and making sure that workers are treated fairly and get their fair share of the wealth being created. Again this is the result of a growing economy, growing production and growing investment.
A major plank of President Mnangagwa’s policy is the Vision 2030, pushing Zimbabwe upwards into an upper-middle income economy by 2030. That is not just a mantra, since we have to think about what that journey means.
The only way to have a successful and continuous increase in national wealth is to make sure that everyone benefits.
That in turn increases growth. Even the arch-capitalist Henry Ford grabbed that point early on as he introduced mass production of motor cars. He worked out that he was not going to succeed unless his own very large workforce could afford to buy the cars they made, so he raised wages and was able to pay these through the higher productivity his assembly lines generated as well as the growing stream of revenue from his growing sales. Everything worked together.
The growing number of the self-employed win as well when employers are fair. Those civil servants and private-sector workers spend the money they earn, and spend quite a lot of it on the goods and services that the self-employed provide. So they win and the whole nation together moves forward. In any case, the small businesses become larger and start hiring people, so they need to remember that they must pay their new workers their just dues.
The Government follows this policy by using the small-scale farming sectors to drive rural development. The whole policy is based on the premise that converting subsistence farmers into small commercial farmers creates the wealth that drives rural industrialisation and the growing percentage of rural dwellers who provide the goods and services that the farmers require and want.
In a developed economy a huge majority of rural dwellers are not farmers, but the underlying rural economy is based on farm production, so the Second Republic rural development policy is based on fact and functional theory, not on some pipedream. Vision 2030 is based on the need for the people, as well as the national economy, to be upper middle income.
While the Second Republic has streamlined labour law, to make it easier to understand and implement, it has retained the essential core that workers and employees are human beings who have rights, as well as duties, and has retained the whole gamut of the national employment councils and workers committees that have been so effective in ensuring that employers and employees can negotiate properly and equally. It has strengthened the similar system in State service, so there is a joint negotiating forum.
The national employment councils were created in settler days to benefit the white workers. They were partially extended under the more liberal settler regime of the late 1950s to more of the formal sector, but only started flourishing fully after independence when everyone was included fully in spirit as well as law.
But they need to be used. Some sectors have very strong and effective NECs and not only do employees benefit, but employers have found that they also benefit by having agreements that work and so can be factored into operations. So they make sure that proper and accurate data is available and enforce the NEC decisions.
Some sectors have very weak NECs, the commercial workers especially, and both employers and employees need to upgrade these. Sometimes past splits give rise to the oddity that workers in the same sector, and even under the same employer, fall under different NECs. Combining them so that the strongest and best represents all workers in a sector makes sense, for both sides.
Labour law is there to create the practical conditions that President Mnangagwa spoke so strongly about, the need for employers and employees to be fair, and for workers to receive their just share of the growing wealth and basically to ensure that workers who fulfil their duties conscientiously are not treated as cogs in a machine but as co-creators of that extra wealth.
Online Reporter