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Patrick Chitumba  Midlands Bureau Chief
AS workers gear themselves to mark Workers’ Day across the country today, there is little cheer for New ZimSteel employees who have gone for five years without getting salaries.New ZimSteel workers told The Chronicle the day comes at a time when most of them have been forced to send their families to the rural areas after failing to pay rentals.

Others continue to lose property to debt collectors as they default on obligations.

As at February last year, New ZimSteel’s arrears to workers and domestic creditors was pegged at $200 million and it is believed to have gone up.

The chairman of New ZimSteel management workers committee, Benedict Moyo said the company employees were going through tough times.

He said schools had withheld O-Level results for their children because of failure to settle outstanding fees.

New ZimSteel workers were last paid in 2011.

“We have gone back to the days of colonialism when workers would stay in single quarters while wives and children were in the rural areas. To cut accommodation costs some of our workmates have sent their children and wives to the rural areas and we are not happy at all,” Moyo said.

He said workers had other obligations to settle such as rentals, electricity bills and other basic requirements.

“As it stands we do not know the way forward,” Moyo said.

He said the Ministry of Industry and Commerce has been mum on the Essar deal that was touted as the panacea to their problems.

“There has been no activity since November when the Chinese contractors who had been roped in by Essar came here and we could not ask them anything since we were given a directive by government not to talk to them,” added Moyo.

Essar, the Africa unit of India’s Essar Group in November 2010 agreed to buy 54 percent in Ziscosteel in a deal worth $750 million, with the government keeping 36 percent and minority investors 10 percent.

But the reopening of the steelmaker has been held up by squabbles between the partners over ownership of mineral claims and the company’s legacy debt.

Under the original agreement, Essar was supposed to inherit the company’s foreign debt which amounted to $300 million and to share the domestic debt, which amounted to $72 million based on the shareholding structure.

Last May, Essar said it would build a new 500,000 tonne steel plant at Ziscosteel for $650 million in two years.

The Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC) has previously described as retrogressive the failure to bring the company back on its feet.