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Botswana: Unions Reject 15 Percent, Demand Negotiations
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Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)
20 March 2008
Posted to the web 24 March 2008
Lekopanye Mooketsi
The president of the Botswana Teachers Union (BTU), Jaftha Radibe has castigated government for wasting resources by appointing salary reviews commissions' whose recommendations are never implemented.
He said government spent more than P6 million on last year's salary review commission.
Radibe said at a meeting held over the weekend that, BTU, the Botswana Secondary School Teachers Union (BOSETU) and the Botswana Land Board Local Authority Workers Union rejected the 15 percent salary increase decided by the government.
He said they rejected the increase because it is not level with the inflationary rate. He suggested that workers should not be awarded increases across the board. Rather, he said, the increase should be based on a pyramid based structure. As it is, he said, lowly paid workers have not been considered.
Radibe said the commission failed to obey its terms of reference which dictated that it must suggest plans for retaining and attracting employees to the civil service.
He expressed concern that the government has also cancelled certain benefits like leave concessions.
The union leader said when there is a commission, the employer should meet the unions to discuss its recommendations. Radibe said they are also disappointed with the Minister of Presidential Affairs and Public Administration, Daniel Kwelagobe, who turned down a request for a meeting.
In their position paper, the three unions said 'as rightly recognised by the commission' the real value of salaries has been eroded by 13 percent if not more. The unions said since 2005 following the devaluation of the Pula, inflation has been quite high.
They added that, budgetary implications aside, a fair increment would have been that which was recommended by the commission at 30 percent.
"Otherwise we feel 35 percent would have been more appropriate, divided into 22 percent for restoration of eroded past salaries and 13 percent to restore public sector competitiveness against the para-statal and private sector labour market".
The unions recommend that the increment should be 30 percent for lower scales, 20 percent in the middle ones and 15 percent in the upper brackets.
"We recommend that in the interest of transparency, we should be informed about the position of the economy which was presumably taken into consideration when government arrived at 15 percent across the board," Radibe said.
The unions further submit that apart from adjusting the current allowance by 15 percent, no new non-monetary measures were proposed, but instead "we even lost some of the incentives we currently have.
The leave travel concession has been abolished. There is even the threat to do away with most of the other allowances in future, for instance, water and electricity subsidy. We therefore feel the results of the exercise have and are likely to make things worse rather than leading to improvements in terms of attraction and retention of skilled personnel. We do not see how abolishing the existing allowances makes working for government more attractive".
The unions said leave concessions were not negotiated with them and they were not replaced with any allowance when it was recommended that it should be abolished. "We therefore recommend that leave concession be reinstated immediately," demanded Radibe.
The unions noted that a number of important issues, that were central to dealing with attraction and retention of qualified staff, have been referred to the ministries for further investigations.
Said Radibe: "While we appreciate the difficulty of dealing with some of the issues we feel these were too important to be referred to the ministries since they are the main things that could address the attraction and retention issues."
The unions recommended that the issues referred to the ministries be brought to the national bargaining council for negotiation. There should also be agreed time frames by which these issues should have been brought to the negotiation table. The unions are also against the shedding of jobs by the government. They recommend that government should continue to play its role in terms of contribution to employment.
The unions said it is not clear why the commission's recommended 15 percent allowance for scare skills was postponed. The unions maintain that this would have been an urgent way of dealing with the attraction and retention issue.
The unions believe that the issues of which the commission was set for have not been adequately addressed. "We do not believe that attraction and retention of skilled workers will be forthcoming as nothing substantive has changed in terms of our concerns.
We would like our grievances, as articulated in our submission documents to the commission, to be addressed urgently with timeframes that show that these are urgent matters.
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Both the commission's response and the government's recommendations are quite demoralising to staff and will only retard productivity".
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