AFRICANEWS

Lesotho

Government snubs textile workers

Worker in the textile industry are up in arms with the government. They have taken the government to task over its failure to look into their plight. They complain of long hours of work and low wages. Now they have taken to streets to put across their point.

Mphonyane Mothibi, 28, looking shabby and in need of food, a fresh suit of clothes and a bath, is a single mother of three children aged 10, six and one respectively. She said she lived in the Maseru suburb of Lithabaneng and worked for Evergreen Textiles in the Thetsane Industrial area.

She would not hesitate to tell her wages. "I earn Rands 520-00 per month from which I have to pay Rands 60-00 for rent on the single room in which I live with my three children. Every month I have to pay Rands 120-00 in taxi fares to and from work and I have to live on what is left, a mere Rands 340-00."

She said her children attended school and she had to prepare breakfast for them and pack their lunch boxes. To maximise usage of her money, she paid rent for two months so she could buy groceries for the next comimg month.

The Rands 520-00 she earned included overtime work. "We start working at seven in the morning and knock off at 10 in the evening. We also work Saturdays and Sundays. This money is completely useless, but what can I do? I have to continue working at the firm or my children will starve," she said.

Mothibi was one of the 35,000 strong textile, garment and leather industrial workers who wanted the Minister of Labour to implement a 12 per cent pay hike across the board for all workers, introduce an industrial wages council while abolishing the present wages advisory board, do a poverty line data research to set up a minimum living wage, and to restructure minimum wages based on the Labour code and ILO guidelines.

Labour Minister, Clement Machakela had approved a 6.5 per cent pay rise for all minimum wages advised by the Wages Advisory Board which said it had based the hike on the inflation rate. Workers dispute that the inflation rate is at 6.5 per cent but say it is at 8.5 per cent, a fact supported by the Bureau of Statistics.

The workers also called on the Minister to resign as he had failed their representatives a number of times by promising to discuss a possible pay rise with them before publicising it. Macaefa Billy of the Lesotho Clothing and Allied Workers Union (Lecawu) told this writer that the Minister promised to consult with them before accepting a pay hike advised by the board, "a group of government lackeys with no independent thought or a backbone."

Presenting the petition to Labour Minister, Clement Machakela, Billy explained that the Rands 502-00 minimum wage paid industrial workers could not meet their daily needs. "It is not a living wage," he proclaimed.

He said textile workers did slave work over long hours only to get a wage that even government was ashamed of taxing. He declared the clothes they made were sold in far-away places such as the USA and the UK where each T-shirt fetched as much as US$33-00 the equivalent of Rands 300-00.

He said the ILO guidelines said wages bodies should look into the needs of workers and their families, the general level of wages in the country, the cost of living and changes to it, social security benefits, and economic factors such as levels of production, inflation rate and profits made by investors. "The government of Lesotho does not even know how much these Chinese investors are making in profits as they have not done a survey or followed up on how much money they make when selling their products abroad," he declared.

He said because of this, it was impossible for the wages advisory board to say how much the minimum wage for textile industrial workers should be. He added that since members of the board, whose secretary was the Chief Executive of the Employers’ Association of Lesotho did not know how workers produced in the factories it was morally wrong for them to even begin to think of setting minimum wages.

Earlier in the day, police had beaten up workers and tear-gassed them at the Maseru Industrial area forcing them either to join the protesters’ march or to go home depending on what the police officer responsible for the whipping favoured at the time.

One pregnant woman complained of having been tear-gassed, whipped and trampled upon by police near Precious Garments firm where she worked. "I fear for my unborn baby, maybe it is already deformed because of the punishment I received at the hands of police for nothing as I wanted to go to work when they beat me up," she complained on MoAfrika radio.

A policeman holding a whip near the Central Police station in the city centre told Public Eye that he was ready to whip unruly workers. "If they do not march in line, I will give them a serious whipping to put them in line," he declared.

Workers carried placards proclaiming: "We demand a taxable wage", "we need a living wage, not 6.5%", "the Minister must resign immediately because he is weak", "Lecawu wants industrial council" and "Machakela, take this 6.5% to feed your family with and they chanted songs such as "Machakela, come let us talk, we don’t want 6.5%".

A taxable wage according to Lesotho law is anything above M880-00 and the last message referred to a bank money-bag full of brown cent coins which the workers symbolically gave to Minister Machakela as his pension after resigning or being sacked by the Prime Minister.

Machakela gave a lame excuse for a response as he claimed he was receiving the petition to read so he could give a response to the leadership of the workers at a later date yet he had received the petition earlier the previous Thursday, ample time for him to have prepared a response.

Prime Minister Mosisili refused to see the workers as he claimed to be busy and at Parliament, the Clerk of Court, Mr Monare Thulo, received the petition on behalf of the Speaker of the National Assembly.

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