The new normal Meikles workers demonstrate after losing their jobs in Bulawayo in this file photo
Meikles workers demonstrate after losing their jobs in Bulawayo in this file photo

Meikles workers demonstrate after losing their jobs in Bulawayo in this file photo

Joram Nyathi Spectrum
AFTER the sound and the fury, then the Amendment. Labour and business have said they will challenge the new Labour Amendment Act signed into law by President Mugabe last week after it was passed by Parliament.

They say the new Amendment Act left them with unresolved grievances: labour, because the terminal benefits are inadequate; employers, because they acted according to a Supreme Court ruling and so payment of terminal benefits cannot apply in retrospect. They also want the common law three months’ termination notice retained.

The Labour Amendment Act was itself rushed through Parliament to staunch mass dismissals of workers following the July 17 Supreme Court ruling that employers could legally fire workers on three months’ notice under a hitherto dormant common law. It was a troubling ruling, but one which has had the effect of redefining Zimbabwe’s industrial relations as we have known them thus far, as well as how labour aligns itself to politics and capital.

It is a ruling which could decide the fate of major political parties in Zimbabwe, especially those whose purported key constituency is formalised labour.

The global economy is in turmoil. Typical of capitalism, when there is a depression or an economic meltdown, the first casualty is labour and its attendant retirement packages, hence the popularity of the Supreme Court ruling among employers. Labour is deemed to constitute the biggest cost of any enterprise regardless of Adam Smith’s succinct observation that, “It was not by gold or by silver but by labour that all the wealth of the world was purchased.”

Whichever way one wants to look at it, the biggest loser from the Supreme Court ruling in political terms is the MDC-T given the number of people who have lost their jobs in the past few weeks.

More than that, the ruling brought about a traumatic end to an abnormal, foul and a historical coupling of labour and capital, the latter trying to use its labour force and the MDC-T as a Trojan horse to get Zanu-PF out of power because of its radical, left-leaning policies. That capital came in the form of industrialists and white former commercial farmers who wanted a political agent to protect their economic interests from what they considered inimical Zanu-PF policies such as the land reform programme and black economic empowerment.

In this uncommon and unnatural coupling, the MDC-T found itself having to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares. The Supreme Court ruling of July 17 struck at the heart of that abnormality. In the ensuing genocidal dismissals of employees, the party found itself in a dilemma: to fight the workers’ cause or to defend the employers?

The Supreme Court ruling was for both the MDC-T and Zanu-PF a replay of the Jealous Mawarire verdict ahead of the 2013 harmonised elections: a choice had to be made for or against.

Predictably, the workers feel hugely betrayed by the “labour-backed” MDC-T as they got the most unkindest cuts of all. That pain of treachery cannot be assuaged by the MDC-T’s sterile mantra that Zanu-PF can rig the elections but not the economy, especially when it is self-evident that business was complicit in sabotaging the economy after Zanu-PF won the harmonised elections. There were massive cash withdrawals and externalisation, and company closures. When the Zanu-PF government did not fall, they vented their vengeance on the workers. But the mass dismissals of workers has cut the tap root of whatever remained of the MDC-T’s presumed labour support.

The workers were left high and dry by the employers. In one fell swoop, the Supreme Court ruling tore apart the veil which had since 1999 covered unnatural bedroom acts between labour and capital — the assumed convergence of class interests between employers and employees. The scales of ignorance must have now fallen off workers’ eyes, who must finally see the reality of their sheer nakedness in all its ugliness.

The new normal

In all this ugliness, the MDC-T’s ideational dysfunctionality keeps being exposed further, the worse to alienate it from the worker. It recently told the world it would soon launch a campaign urging its supporters and Zimbabweans to boycott buying local products. This is supposed to hurt Zanu-PF-linked businesses in the pocket to make the economy “squeal” or “scream”. The irony is that the same fired workers, largely victims of foreign businesses and their profit interests, are now being called upon to sustain the same businesses which jettisoned them like so much flotsam.

But the truth is that beside corrupt elements in the ruling party, it is unlikely that they would deliberately sabotage their own economy. Who is likely to be more concerned about the economic fate of Zimbabwe between a foreign investor and a Zanu-PF member? It’s only the most naïve worker, the one who believes Rhodesia was better, who can believe Zimbabwe is better served and saved by foreigners. The MDC-T has just pitched its ideas at the level of its incompetence and betrayed the cause of workers.

So we must ignore the “Buy Zimbabwe” campaign and buy foreign so that more wealth flows out of the country! Is that the ideological ballast behind calls for unregulated, footloose FDI and unrestricted importation of locally available consumer goods? To serve what cause?

There clearly is no chance of an ideological reorientation for this stricken party. Its contempt for vendors and the informal sector in general will seal its fate, yet that is what likely could save Zanu-PF. And one doesn’t have to belong to Zanu-PF to get the logic.

Zanu-PF is the ruling party. It should not be expected to come out smelling of roses from the Supreme Court judgment. Yet somehow it seems to have had a thick carpet laid under it to ensure it didn’t shatter on impact like the proverbial tortoise; if only it can save itself from internal enmities and rivalries over succession.

The irony is that Zanu-PF’s cushion should come from its most maligned policies which have created what economists now call the new normal; a huge informal sector sustaining a majority of the population, but also its land reform and economic empowerment programmes.

The point is that most of the fired workers now find themselves sharing space with vendors of all manner of merchandise. They have little alternative. The companies which fired them will not give any meaningful terminal benefits. Workers are on their own. MDC-T offers no safety net or survival kit. Instead, it stands on the side of foreigners, the same forces fighting black economic empowerment efforts.

This opens a gap for Zanu-PF to take the informal sector, the new economy, seriously and support these people with resources. They need to be organised, retrained and given resources to expand their enterprises. Local retailers can also support this sector by stocking their products. So long as they are affordable, they will find buyers. The issue of quality can only improve over time with greater innovation and more confidence and investment. Then they can grow to become part of the SMEs which can be taxed.

On the other hand, it might turn out that, now, without too much prompting from Zanu-PF, both employers and employees might find themselves mapping out new terms for engagement, first, as an attempt by business to build confidence and regain the trust of labour, second, as an attempt by labour to cushion itself against wanton layoffs.

What the Supreme Court ruling exposed is not only the vulnerability of the employee in job negotiations, but more importantly, the lack of job security. It in fact vindicated Zanu-PF’s empowerment policies over the vagaries of the job market, a key campaign plank of the MDCs. Employees should demand more say, even if it means buying shares, in the employing enterprise, from the beginning.

We have entered a period when the labour movement is at its most vulnerable since independence, when the government is slowly but certainly losing space in the economy and business is starting to reassert its neoliberal nature on the back of a Supreme Court bonanza.

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