14 March 2008
Maputo — The chairperson of the Board of Directors of Mozambique's publicly owned ports and rail company, CFM, Rui Fonseca, on Friday accused some former CFM workers of being "mobilised and manipulated by outsiders" in an attempt to discredit the massive re-organisation of the company, and the huge sums in compensation paid to the many thousands of workers who were laid off.
The programme to "restructure" the work force was drawn up in 1998, when CFM employed 19,387 people. The company was grossly overmanned - partly because key parts of the rail system had been destroyed during the war of destabilisation, but their workers were still on CFM's books, and partly because of technological change in railway and port operations.
In the drastic slimming down that followed, 13,577 workers left the company. CFM says that about 13,000 of these workers were given counseling, and 6,270 of them attended 475 professional training courses, intended to ensure that they could obtain other jobs or become self-employed. About 9,000 of the former CFM workers are now in new jobs or are self-employed.
The compensation packages that CFM paid to the workers made redundant was more than twice as much as it was legally obliged to pay under the country's labour legislation. This entire programme cost about 80 million US dollars, and was subject to internal and external audits, including by the World Bank, which was one of the main funding agencies that supported the restructuring.
Despite this, groups of ex-CFM workers have held demonstrations demanding more money, and claiming that the severance pay packages were badly calculated.
Speaking in Maputo, at the annual meeting of the CFM Council of Directors, Fonseca said these former workers "are stirring up agitation", and their arguments were without merit, since the CFM restructuring programme was designed to mitigate the impact of mass redundancies.
For Fonseca, this was not just a case of exceptional redundancy conditions, but also of retraining the workers, and ensuring that they still had a place in the Mozambican labour market. Many had also been given support to set up their own small businesses.
Nonetheless, the ex-CFM workers have taken their complaints to the Petitions Commission of the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic which, on 14 February, met with the CFM Board. Despite the Board's assurances, and the repeated audits of the programme, the Petitions Commission decided it was necessary to ascertain whether the amounts paid were indeed correct.
So the Commission has decided to use public money to hire a consultancy firm, KPMG, which has been given until May to analyse the entire CFM restructuring programme.
"We must show the greatest collaboration and vigilance, so as not to allow any blemishes on a process that was entirely transparent and deeply social", said Fonseca.
Social responsibility had been key to the whole procedure followed by CFM. "It is these values of solidarity and of fairer redistribution policies that should prevail", he declared.
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