INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS EVOLUTION

This week, I would like to share my response to different civic groups which include formal and informal sectors of our society and young workers. They asked me a question if our Industrial Relations Act and other Eswatini labour laws promote or hinder economic growth?

Because I didn’t know where this question was coming from and looking at the diverse combination of the audience, I felt it necessary to be as elaborate as possible by giving the background of labour relations development  in the country through different stages.
And my answer was and still is: “Yes! Our industrial relations and labour laws promote economic growth and encourage social dialogue. 

A little background

Before the Industrial Relations and Employment Act, 1980, the then existing systems engineered by the government and employers were not congruent to the international labour standards, and these frequently caused conflicts between the employers and government.

After the big 1963 national strike, where there was a coincidence of the national demand of independence by the peoples of Eswatini from the British leadership and the demand for one pound a day minimum wage by the workers.

This common cause strike caused government to frown at workers and devised a new mode of workplace relations control unilaterally without consulting or contacting both stakeholders.

This intervention was the unilateral imposition of the “Ndabazabantus’ (King’s liaison officers) at the workplaces to serve as Industrial Relations Managers/officers without any training in the field and without the consent of the employer, yet the employer was demanded to remunerate the Ndabazabantu at the rate of the highest official in the factory. This included even their benefits. In short, each company that had been provided with Ndabazabantu had to pay them the same salary and benefits as their Managing Director.

Fortunately, employees were also not happy with the Ndabazabantus and for the first time, workers and employers agreed on one thing: they collectively saw Ndabazabantus as intruders to the workplace and decided to take steps to inform the authorities about the challenges faced at the workplace. This exercise was resolved by natural attrition and withdrawal of some.

However, this was just a short term victory for workers as employers replaced Ndabazabantus’ with former or retired police officers who also were not trained in industrial relations, but good at taking orders from their superiors who at the workplace environment made workers the most negatively affected by this paradigm shift.

It must be remembered that there were very few trained human resource managers and industrial relations officers.
During both the Ndabazabantu and police officers taking over personnel duties, workers were the victims of oppression, appalling working conditions and pittance wages, worked overtime without pay, suffered corporal punishment, women without maternity leave, racism and nepotism was high at workplaces. As a result of these sour relations at the work place, wild cat strikes were the order of the day and dismissals happened at a whim without due process by tindunas and baas boys of workers at the workplaces.

Eswatini Joins the ILO

In 1976, Eswatini government joined the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the organisation assisted the country technically and advised it on the relevant conventions to ratify so that new labour laws could be extrapolated from the ratified conventions, and by so doing they were domesticated so that our labour statutes remain in conformity with the international conventions.

On the April 24, 1978, Eswatini Government ratified several conventions which include the following:
l The freedom of Association convention 87
l The right to collective bargaining convention 98
l Equal pay for work of equal value convention 100
l Convention against forced labour convention 29
l Convention against forced labour convention 105
l Convention on minimum age convention 38
These above mentioned few conventions are part of the six of the ILO eight core pacts, and these treaties which formed the bedrock of the Industrial Relations Act and Employment Act, 1980 produced a rights based and dialogue prone labour laws.

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