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WE want to commend Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Minister Prisca Mupfumira for reacting with urgency to a Supreme Court ruling last Friday which has the effect of stripping all workers in Zimbabwe legally naked.
The Supreme Court ruled that an employer could terminate a worker’s contract by giving a notice of three months. The employer doesn’t need to give reasons. The employee has no legal recourse to demand reasons for termination of the contract, and length of employment is not a factor. There is no mention of a terminal benefit for the worker. The ruling is based on common law where it is implied that the parties to an employment contract are equals. It is shocking even to imagine how such an assumption of equality was arrived at. What induces shock to the ordinary worker is that the ruling was made by the final legal authority in the land given that judges of the Supreme Court also sit in the Constitutional Court, rendering an appeal no more than an academic exercise.
The ruling in the Zuva Petroleum case against its former managers exposed dangerous legislation which is still applicable in this country but belongs to prehistoric times, making a slave better because he never signed a contract and was never presumed to have any rights beside the whims of his owner. That is an extremely dangerous state of affairs in this age of constitutionalism and human rights.
It is for this reason that we applaud Government, through Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Minister Mupfumira for seeking ways “to settle on corrective legal options to safeguard the worker”.
She noted, quite correctly, we believe, that the “judgment has opened a floodgate of termination of employment on notice, resulting in numerous workers unfairly losing their jobs”. Minister Mupfumira said her ministry was analysing the consequences of the judgment to minimise its damaging implications.
While it is important for Government to engage its labour and capital partners under the Tripartite Negotiating Forum to reach common ground on the implications of this ruling, we believe the urgency of the matter demands a statutory instrument if not invocation of Presidential Powers to avert a national catastrophe.
This law has the effect of negating the very purpose of the country’s Constitution which gives many rights to a Zimbabwean as a citizen, such as access to education, shelter and fair labour practices. None of these can be enjoyed without job security. This common law creates a citizen who has a right to employment but has no security and cannot use that employment contract to get a bank loan because he can be fired without prior warning soon after signing the loan agreement. The risks of non-performing personal loans are incalculably compounded.
But there are even dire social, economic and political implications, and we don’t believe this law means what was contemplated by the legislature. Part of the mass unemployment the country faces today is a product of Zimbabwe’s flirtation with the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes. The results are there on the streets for all to see. All the investment in education, health and other social services were eroded under esap.
After a hiatus, this common law ruling brings back the effects of esap with heartless vengeance. Already there are reports of companies countrywide going on employment termination rampage, taking advantage of the ruling before loopholes are plugged. Politics of economic sabotage to fuel a national uprising can’t be ruled out.
It is one thing for investors to ask for labour law reforms to reduce employment costs and presumably to create more jobs, but it quite something else to promote lawlessness and national anxiety where no employee is certain whether they have a job tomorrow because the employer has been given the powers of a deity. Not even countries with the best social welfare systems can afford to treat workers with such callousness.
Indeed, the ruling has come at an opportune moment when Government is in the process of aligning various laws to the Constitution. We face an emergency calling for speedy redress. Minister Mupfumira has her finger on the pulse: “In essence my role as minister responsible for labour is to strike a balance between the interests of the employer and employee,” she said.
Workers play a decisive role in the growth and prosperity on any organisation. Why should they be the first sacrifice when the fortunes of the same organisation turn negative?
Online Reporter