Unemployment soars amid budget cuts
Not a festive May Day
Namibia will this year commemorate Workers' Day in the shadow of skyrocketing unemployment brought about by almost weekly retrenchments which have affected close to 41 000 workers countrywide.
Speaking to Namibian Sun, National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) secretary-general Job Muniaro said many workers had fallen victim to the country's cash-flow problems. Many construction projects came to a standstill last year following a serious water crisis, which put pressure on the economy and resulted in a string of retrenchments.
It is not only the construction industry that is bearing the brunt of government budget cuts, though. Recent media reports showed that 1 200 workers had lost their jobs in the last three months of 2016.
These retrenchments occurred mainly in the construction, food services, agriculture, forestry and fishing industries, and most recently the mining sector.
“It is our biggest challenge. People are not just losing jobs, they are losing their livelihoods, medical aid, salaries, cars and houses. The entire family suffers.
It has far-reaching effects on families. People become a burden to the state because they cannot provide for themselves,” said Muniaro.
He added that an influx of Chinese state-owned companies and their workers aggravated the situation. Muniaro said it was time for the government to consider laws that would explicitly protect the rights of local workers.
“You cannot have an individual builder from a developing country competing for a tender with a foreign state-owned company from a developed country with sophisticated skills.
These types of situations are killing our small-scale builders because they never get a chance to develop,” he said.
Awareness
Meanwhile, as workers struggled to hold onto their jobs and the uncertainty grew, many still did not know their rights, according to Muniaro.
He said many workers' rights were “passively violated” because they were illiterate and did not know that they had a right to decent treatment. “It is difficult to empower these workers because sometimes employers do not want them to know their rights,” he said. The union leader said this ignorance had cost many workers their jobs because they simply stayed away from work out of frustration, not realising there were procedures for registering their grievances.
JEMIMA BEUKES
Speaking to Namibian Sun, National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) secretary-general Job Muniaro said many workers had fallen victim to the country's cash-flow problems. Many construction projects came to a standstill last year following a serious water crisis, which put pressure on the economy and resulted in a string of retrenchments.
It is not only the construction industry that is bearing the brunt of government budget cuts, though. Recent media reports showed that 1 200 workers had lost their jobs in the last three months of 2016.
These retrenchments occurred mainly in the construction, food services, agriculture, forestry and fishing industries, and most recently the mining sector.
“It is our biggest challenge. People are not just losing jobs, they are losing their livelihoods, medical aid, salaries, cars and houses. The entire family suffers.
It has far-reaching effects on families. People become a burden to the state because they cannot provide for themselves,” said Muniaro.
He added that an influx of Chinese state-owned companies and their workers aggravated the situation. Muniaro said it was time for the government to consider laws that would explicitly protect the rights of local workers.
“You cannot have an individual builder from a developing country competing for a tender with a foreign state-owned company from a developed country with sophisticated skills.
These types of situations are killing our small-scale builders because they never get a chance to develop,” he said.
Awareness
Meanwhile, as workers struggled to hold onto their jobs and the uncertainty grew, many still did not know their rights, according to Muniaro.
He said many workers' rights were “passively violated” because they were illiterate and did not know that they had a right to decent treatment. “It is difficult to empower these workers because sometimes employers do not want them to know their rights,” he said. The union leader said this ignorance had cost many workers their jobs because they simply stayed away from work out of frustration, not realising there were procedures for registering their grievances.
JEMIMA BEUKES
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