WHY EXCLUDE TRADE UNIONS FROM DIALOGUE FORUM?
PRESIDENT Hakainde Hichilema launched the Public-Private Dialogue Forum for the Private Sector and Economic Development at Lusaka’s Mulungushi International Conference Centre on April 27, 2022 (Daily Nation, April 28, 2022).
The Forum is basically the institutional framework for the Public-Private Partnership (PPP). Three days later, President Hichilema was the guest of honour at the Labour Day celebrations on May 1, 2022 at the Freedom Statue in Lusaka.
It is against this background that I felt pity for the president of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) Mr Nkole Chishimba when he took up the podium to address the trade union members and the working population in general.
The Dialogue Forum creates a dual policy platform for investors or employers to the total exclusion of the labour movement.
The employers will sit as investors in the Dialogue Forum to formulate pro-business economic and financial policies. They will, as they do now, sit as employers within the Tripartite Consultative Labour Council under the Ministry of
Labour and Social Security defending policies in which the labour movement has had no participation.
This is simply double dealing.
Mr Chishimba and his colleagues in the trade union movement have been dribbled from participating in the key economic-financial policy
regime and must watch the space as the Dialogue Forum pushes for labour flexibility that the PF regime fought so hard to tighten.
One of the consequences of labour flexibility as witnessed under the MMD labour law regime was high rates of casualisation and attendant result of loss of job and income security, and increase in the working poor.
ZCTU should stay alert to the outcomes of the Dialogue Form, if possible push for their inclusion because labour is also an important investment asset, government must just put premium on financial capital.