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Gweru City Council is in turmoil with workers up in arms over a number of issues including non-payment of salaries.
The workers have engaged in strike action to force management to address their grievances. We have nothing against workers who demand that they get what is due to them from their employer. After all, workers go to work to earn a living so that they can sustain their families.

If workers go for months without receiving their salaries, frustration begins to build up.

However, we believe that there has to be a civilised way of resolving workplace grievances and what is happening in Gweru is not civilised at all.

As a prelude to their strike, workers went around illegally disconnecting water from institutions that owed council money. They also confiscated a council mini-bus to prevent councillors from travelling to the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair which opened in Bulawayo on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, workers embarked on a strike and innocent residents have been caught in the cross fire. Council workers employed in essential services such as clinics and the emergency department joined in the work stoppage.

Bearing the brunt of the strike are not the council managers who are accused of being indifferent to the workers’ suffering as they can consult private doctors if they fall sick, but ordinary rate-payers.

As it is, some people on anti-retroviral therapy have failed to access treatment, putting their lives at risk.

The irony of it is that some workers in non-essential services, such as revenue collection, have not joined the strike.

While many people might sympathise with the workers over their plight, Gweru City Council workers risk losing this sympathy and incurring public wrath by their ambush tactics which are affecting the same rate-payers that they should respect. Disconnecting water at public institutions without council approval is uncalled for as rightly pointed out by the Mayor Hamutendi Kombayi, some of these institutions have payment plans to settle their arrears.

Workers need to solve their dispute with management without involving innocent rate-payers and residents.

Gweru city fathers also need to lead by example. Reports state that their allowances are up to date, with councillors gobbling $240,000 from last year to date. If these reports are true then it shows that councillors are insensitive to the plight of their workers.

Exemplary city fathers would have agreed to forego their allowances until the council’s financial position improved. Councillors should not earn a living by representing  their wards. It would also be good if the councillors forgo their annual pilgrimage to the ZITF because it is clear that council is broke.

The mayor, through his Midlands Hotel, owes council $300,000 in unpaid rates and water charges since 2012. While the mayor has tried to defend himself saying he was divorced from the Midlands Hotel as an individual, the fact remains that he, or his family, owns it and the fact that the bill has been allowed to accumulate to such levels without legal action being taken is likely to be because of his influential position as the city’s first resident.

As an interested party in Midlands Hotel, Kombayi should be at the forefront of making sure that the facility’s bills are paid. That way, other rate-payers would follow his example by honouring their bills.