Africa-Press – Botswana. A labour analyst has posited that the cries of the National Amalgamated Central, Local and Parastatal Manual Workers’ Union over the recent five percent salary increment are not crocodile tears.
The union, commonly referred to as Manual Workers, recently held a press conference in Gaborone at which it decried that the recent salary increment will not add any meaningful value to many of its members who mostly earn lower salaries than other union members within the public service.
The Manual Workers lamented that in August 2019, the six cooperating trade unions entered into a collective labour agreement with the employer that as of June 2020, the lowest paid workers in the public service should not earn less than P2,500.
This agreement, Manual Workers noted, was done after consulting an expert who said the P2,500 salary increase was feasible.
Manual Workers, however, said they received a shock of their lives this year in February when five cooperating trade unions told them the salary increment should now be across board and not be done using the pyramid format that they had earlier agreed upon.
The salary increase across board, Manual Workers decry, was not going to cushion their members from inflation which had sky rocketed and was compounded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amongst other reasons.
“Our colleague abandoned the salary increase using the pyramid format that we had agreed upon despite the fact that the expert that we had all engaged said that it was feasible to increase them using the pyramid format,” the union with the largest membership in Botswana further said.
The status quo, Manual Workers added, left them with no choice but to negotiate with the government alone as it has already started this week.
The union stated that it is common course that their members got a raw deal from the current negotiations with the employer if the recent salary increments are left to remain hence its decision to negotiate for a better bargain with the government alone.
The labour analyst, Mokotedi Dipogiso of University of Botswana (UB) says that he agrees with the grievances of the Manual Workers.
Firstly, Dipogiso said, the issue that members of Manual Workers are at the lower scale of payments is very important to them.
“If you increase salaries by five percent, it means that when inflation comes, it erodes wages of the lowest paid workers. To these employees, the five percent increment is not a substantive increment because it does not add meaningful value to their food basket. A meaningful improvement will improve the food basket of someone who is paid on C1 scale and above. For example, someone on these C1 and C2 scales will get an increment in the range of P700 while the one on the lower grade will get an increment of P100,” Dipogiso elaborated.
Reasonably, Dipogiso continued, employees on C1 scale and above are the ones getting meaningful increments that will improve their food baskets with P700 and more.
“Someone who gets an increment of about P1,000-P3,000 can actually top up their loan with financial institutions or they can get a new loan using this particular increment. On the other hand, someone who gets an increment of P100 cannot do anything meaningful with it,” said Dipogiso.
Dipogiso borrowed a quote from Niccolò Machiavelli, a 16th century Florentine philosopher known primarily for his political ideas, who once said, “The structure of public finance pits the wealthy and humble the poor”, to buttress his reasoning.
The analyst said the other critical issue that should be considered is the issue of urgency.
“When you look at the structure of representation within trade unions, you will realise that most union leaders are on C1 scale and above. Now the current contingency works for those unions whose members are predominantly on C1 scale and above. This is obviously an exclusion of members of the Manual Workers who are predominantly on lower salary scales. Other unions also have members who are in the A scale like those of the Manual Workers. However, this contingency means that the urgency of those unions is skewed towards their members on C1 scale and above at the exclusion of their members who are on lower scales. The whole scheme of things in the bargaining structures have no contingency of addressing income gaps and improving the livelihoods of workers at lower scales of the pay structures,” Dipogiso posits.
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