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The recommended absolute minimum wage in all sectors and all salary negotiations of the equivalent of US$150 a month, just under $95 000 at yesterday’s interbank rate, ensures a little more than survival.
The recommendation came from the resuscitated Tripartite Negotiating Forum that brings together representatives of employers, employees and the Government.
It thus deals with the art of the possible, and allows rational discussion where everything can be laid out on the table and efforts to build a consensus can be pressed.
This forum and the need for this discussion is needed, and is valuable, and we hope that the forum will now continue to meet more regularly and start debating issues that affect both employers and employees, with the Government as participant and referee, and can work towards finding acceptable solutions to many other issues.
One point about a minimum wage needs to be remembered. It is the bottom run on the ladder of pay scales that all national employment councils create and have ratified by the Government.
This means that the many rungs above the lowest run obviously involve higher pay, so most employees are paid more than the minimum. But once you put in the minimum, the other pay scales normally shake themselves out quite quickly as the pay differentials are applied.
One factor is looking at the lowest pay on a payscale is the poverty datum line provided by ZimStat at periodic intervals. This is the calculation, which ZimStat derives from the data it uses to calculate the cost of living, to find the figure needed to keep a person in decency although not necessarily in comfort, let alone luxury.
The calculation leaves nothing for the odd beer, or any significant variation in diet behind the healthy minimum. It is what it says, the rock bottom needed to live in health.
In August ZimStat worked out that this was $26 623 per person, with $20 461 of that going on food. Monthly inflation has fallen to very low levels since so the figure will have grown but not by much.
But when almost 77 percent of your money is spent on food you know you have a very low pay. While people will spend more on food as they earn more, mainly to widen the variety of what they eat and add a few luxuries, even the richest person cannot spend more than a few times what the poorest must pay.
This means that as people climb the income ladder they spend an ever-lower percentage of their income on food, even while spending more on food in actual cash.
The general family, ZimStat has found and the figure it uses in its weighting for calculating inflation, spends around 31 percent of total spending on food, so the poverty datum line is the bottom end.
So those employers who complain about the minimum wage and the poverty datum line need to think very seriously.
Many years ago a group of students, trying to show just what the poverty datum line meant, bought every item used in the food calculation, in the quantities required for a family of four, and displayed these.
It did not need a very large bag and the basicness of the mix was very apparent.
To say there were no luxuries was right, but many things that many people think is a basic, not a luxury, can be redefined in the poverty datum line.
The very high percentage of food spending in the poverty datum line calculations, and so to a degree in setting the minimum wage, does allow for some flexibility when it comes to some semi-formal wages, such as those for domestic service and farming where accommodation and food are included.
But these need to be used in modifications with reluctance, and without going too far.
Ideally everyone should be paid at the very least what their representative organisations believe is close to the rock bottom minimum, and that the general uplift in Zimbabwe’s economy should as soon as possible impose a new lower level, where a person is better off working for themself in some sort of small scale business rather than accepting a sub-minimum wage.
This is what, after all, killed off domestic service in most high-wage countries.
Many who might have gone into domestic service in the past instead went to work in factories, sometimes making the washing machines and other appliances that replaced them, and earning far high wages doing so.
The other change we have seen with the tripartite negotiating forum is that the Government is not returning to the 1980s when a national minimum wage was set by decree.
This did not really work and caused a lot of problems, some of them with wages that were in fact too low.
Instead although returning where a national standard is announced, rather than an enforced minimum, the Government has insisted that both employer and employee organisations are involved in setting this standard.
There may well be some sectors where the standard is considered too high. Here employer organisations can do some of their own in-house pressure and state that if most can afford what is a very basic minimum, then everyone should be able to do so. Exceptions should be very rare.
The main pressure should be the other way round, trade unions and others stressing that the minimum is after all what the school-leaver moving into unskilled labour and probably under training can be paid.
And these employee representatives should be pushing hard for much better pay as skills are acquired and responsibilities increase. In some NEC tables the pay differentials between grades are remarkably low.
But at least we are now setting standards, and hopefully the TNF will be pushing ahead on this, setting more standards across the whole spectrum of employment and conditions of service that can then be used for the detailed negotiations within each sector.
The aim is viable and profitable business paying living and just wages, and this does not mean the goals are exclusive, but does mean people have to look at the figures and find the right path.
Online Reporter