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TODAY is May Day and the ideas behind this special day celebrated for more than 130 years remain as valid as they did when workers internationally started demanding an eight-hour day, the trigger for setting May 1 as an international holiday.
There has been much progress in many countries since those early days of creating, maintaining and extending worker rights, and not just leaving them to pure market forces, as understood by business owners, that had produced so much distress during the 19th century as the world industrialised, often under appalling conditions for the new workforces.
The industrial revolution had destroyed a lot of the older ideas that power and economic control came with duty and responsibility; the old systems had not been nearly so fair as some defenders made out, but they were a great deal better than what happened in the industrial revolution where huge enterprises were created, employing vast numbers of workers, and whose owners never met their workforces, let alone sympathised with them and their troubles.
So there was a need for a global focus on bringing up the most important issues, and May Day, or International Workers Day as it is known in many countries, was introduced from the bottom up.
Zimbabwe at independence inherited many of these 20th century traditions and May Day was one of the first new public holidays, along with major revision in labour codes, and more importantly in labour practice.
Some bits of the old white system, where they applied to labour relations within the white community, had value.
One example was the employment councils, where business owners and the trade unions representing workers could hammer out deals in free collective bargaining.
This was at first restricted to the white community and “white jobs” but even when it in theory became non-racial in the 1950s under Garfield Todd, it remained in practice something that worked for white workers, but not the majority.
Although formal colour bars were ended in employment, they remained in practice, with the Rhodesia Front regime being particularly keen on this, quite understandably since the RF was basically an alliance of the large-scale white commercial farmers, who wanted to maintain their ownership of not just half the farming land, but generally the better half and farm with a cheap workforce, and the white skilled workers who wanted to maintain their well-paid lifestyles without any competition from the black majority.
The RF kept both groups within its orbit by tightening the Land Tenure Act over land, and by making a mockery of non-racial employment theory by manipulating African education.
The RF policy was to expand access to primary education, so as to ensure that black workers were usefully literate, but sharply restrict access to secondary education, especially to O-level and A-level. The object was to ensure there was a large unskilled and very cheap workforce, with some semi-skilled workers who could never progress.
The employment councils inherited at independence usually had grade and pay scales that had a huge gap between the semi-skilled pay grades and the skilled pay grades, reflecting the racial gap.
But on the other hand the system of employment councils in each sector had produced a functioning industrial peace for skilled workers, with very little strike action and a thrust towards independent negotiation.
As with so many white privileges, the new post-independence government saw the smartest route was to extend what worked for a minority to the majority, and labour law was dramatically revised as a result, along with the opening of education, and especially secondary and tertiary education, to all, and opened in a practical manner.
The national employment councils were properly opened to all workers, the gap between skilled and semi-skilled posts was reduced, entry was no longer restricted and, perhaps the biggest practical change, the road to skilled status was opened through the advent of trade testing.
All this produced fairly quickly the new-style national employment councils, and a Labour Act that actually offered practical rights to all workers.
At that stage a national minimum wage was needed, but again this was largely set at what the better employers were already paying. These employers had not only been embarrassed by those who tried total exploitation, but resented the fact that a lot of employers were able to undercut them by paying peanuts.
That requirement of a minimum wage has been dropped, but only at the national level, with every employment council setting its own minimum, so every worker in formal employment still benefits from a minimum wage, and these do not vary much between sectors so there remains something close to a national minimum wage.
National employment councils vary, regrettably. The good are very effective and the bad less so, but those can be made better by both employers and employees making them better, a point that many people see.
The Second Republic has made attracting external investment a major plank of economic growth. This has seen a lot a legal and administrative streamlining, but two major essentials remain, the tax code and the employment law.
An investor needs to pay taxes and needs to treat workers fairly. Some have suggested that there should be statutory limits on use of expatriate workers, but in practice this is not needed.
One attraction Zimbabwe offers investors is the result of more than four decades of education reform and growth. There are huge pools of skilled people in Zimbabwe and even if an investor pays well, a Zimbabwean is always cheaper than an expatriate, never needing “home leave” for example, or foreign boarding school fees for children.
So the standard new investor might bring in a “tiger team” when setting up a new venture, but with Zimbabwean understudies who take over almost all the work when the new venture is commissioned. Several foreign companies have in fact moved some Zimbabweans to their global teams as well, after finding them very efficient.
So far there has been no problem with most external investors. The Second Republic twin industrial policy of creating new jobs as well as maintaining worker rights in established jobs works. The expansion of employment is probably the best long-term way of preserving and improving good conditions with the pool of underemployed labour diminishing so employers need to treat workers decently to keep them.
This does not mean that workers, and these days the ever-larger pool of self employed who also require a degree of legal protection, should not be seeking a better life for themselves and their families.
But the basic legal frameworks that establish high levels of fairness are in place, so what is required is a commitment to make them work as intended.
So May Day becomes a different sort of celebration, one where practical policies and implementing those policies must make the agenda, to ensure that workers do get the fair and proper treatment which the law now grants them.
Online Reporter