IR LANDSCAPE HOSTILE TO WORKERS

THE recent rolling strikes by public sector associations (PSAs) to pressure government to pay civil servants accumulated cost of living salary adjustments (CoLAs) over a three-year period, has somewhat revealed a grotesque industrial relations landscape in the kingdom that remains hostile to organised labour, as well as militating against workers exercising their rights as free men and women.

There was some hope earlier this year after the King’s participation at the centennial celebrations of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland, of a thaw in the historically hostile domestic environment towards labour unions.

Indeed the Sovereign, in his ILO address, had underpinned negotiations as the turnkey in resolving disputes. That somewhat gave hope that government would soften its traditional hostile posture towards organised labour. But if recent events are anything to go by, nothing has changed. If makhundu was synonymous with the former late Prime Minister Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini, then that narrative was erroneous. Now we know beyond any shadow of doubt that makhundu is synonymous with and is in fact the bedrock that anchors the Tinkhundla political system.

Brutality

As I see it, the brutality the police service visited on striking workers was nothing new. Besides confirming this, the Kingdom of Eswatini, to be a police State, the brutality on striking workers is what got this country kicked out of AGOA as well as being put in a special paragraph by the ILO. And brutality is government’s weapon of choice whenever it refuses to compromise – which is more often than not - with workers on the negotiating table. Exacerbating matters is the fact that police, an appendage of the political system, are a law unto themselves in the absence of an independent watchdog to monitor police abuses.

Testimony to this being the witch-hunt – extending even to social media - for PSA leaders and prominent members in the recent strikes that is not just for social purposes but to harass, persecute, prosecute and malign them. That is the stock-in-trade of the political status quo.
Besides weathering the physical and psychological threats that make the industrial relations landscape uneven and in fact hostile, even the legal framework is heavily biased against workers.

While on one hand the law allows workers to engage in legal strikes, on the other hand the same law renders this bargaining tool useless by allowing the employer to unleash the no-work no-pay rule to further worsen the socio-economic well-being of workers. As if that was not enough, the courts have added to this misery by allowing employers to engage casuals during strikes by permanent staff, again further nullifying strikes as a bargaining tool for workers.

Negative 

  
This negative cocktail to healthy and cordial industrial relations is brewed from a political environment that cannot be said to be democratic and which is devoid of a culture of human rights. Consequently, workers always find themselves under siege.

Yet for all this iniquity and hostile environment the PSAs are refusing to give up, hence the system’s praise singers, grovellers, bootlickers and sycophants routinely accuse them of pursuing regime change objectives which is further from the truth. But then again the truth is anathema to the Tinkhundla political system, since it is those who peddle lies and falsehoods who always come on top.

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