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Davies Ndumiso Sibanda

LABOUR negotiations are a specialised engagement that require special skills.

As such, not anybody trained in negotiations can competently handle labour negotiations.

Labour negotiations require detailed knowledge of human capital management.

One must have a good understanding of how a good business operates, how Trade Unions operate, how employers organisations operate and above all must have a thorough knowledge of labour law mainly in the area of employer and employee rights and limits.

Where one has to be a member of the negotiating team or chairperson of the negotiations, he/she must not carry baggage that will compromise him before any of the parties.

I have seen cases of employers and trade unions sending wrong people to the negotiating table, these are people who have previously said nasty things about the other party or expressed opinions that cannot make them impartial if they occupy the chairperson’s role.

Other than understanding the trade union and the employers organisation, a good negotiator has respect for the other party’s point of view even if he does not agree with that view and where one is chairperson and there are observations that are not capable of being said in the presence of both parties, off the record side meeting are an important tool.

The spine of any labour negotiations is ensuring that parties are agreed on issues to be negotiated and the order in which they will be negotiated.

There is a need for everyone who is part of the negotiations to be of the same understanding of what each of the issues entails and once that has been agreed, the parties move on to setting ground rules.

Ground rules are not as simple as people think and as such they have to be crafted in a manner that is likely to result in an agreement and where there is no agreement, there must be a clear road map showing what will happen.

Where there are no ground rules, negotiations are very difficult to conduct as parties can bring anything into the negotiations at any stage and along the way parties may abandon the negotiations and go for litigation only to come back after litigation has failed.

Labour negotiations are more than a legal process as they aim at finding a solution that will bring conflict to an end unlike legal solutions where one of the parties may win in court but the problem does not go away and in most cases it gets worse and that is why in labour relations we say there are disputes that should never be taken to court but parties should continue to dialogue until they find each other.

At the tail end of the negotiations is an agreement.

While most people look at an agreement from a simplistic perspective, agreements are complex in that they have to address all possible questions that may arise in relation to the agreement.

There is a need to avoid simple agreements that do not anticipate possible questions that may arise.

For example, an agreement that says a salary increase shall be backdated four months by ten percent looks straightforward but in reality there are many questions that remain unanswered.

There is a likelihood of employees who were dismissed, those who resigned, those who retired, those who took leave and those who were paid cash in lieu of leave including relatives of those who passed on during the period coming to claim the 10 percent for each of the months.

This could be a source of conflict where the employer says the 10 percent is only applicable to those only at work on the day the agreement was made.

In conclusion, only properly trained people from both employers and unions must engage in labour negotiations if the process is to add value.

– Davies Ndumiso Sibanda can be contacted on: Email: [email protected]