ECONOMIST professor Oliver Saasa says government must immediately suspend the employment code act (ECA) and revert back to the old pieces of legislation it repealed.
At a press conference in Lusaka yesterday to disclose the main findings and recommendations of a research, Prof Saasa suggested that an employment and labour task force should be constituted to undertake a comprehensive review of the ECA with Membership drawn from various bodies such as ZACCI, ZAM, chamber of mines, Law development commission, ZCTU, ministry of justice, finance, labour and two labour experts.
Professor Saasa added that another concern was that the ECA was evident absence of any serious consideration of it’s implications at the micro- and macro- economic levels and that consequently, the
introduction of the ECA was not only ill-timed against the backdrop of subdued economic growth in the country.
He explained that the ECA was overly burdensome on employers, particularly small to medium scale ones, which had perpetuated weak investor confidence and had the potential to derail the government agenda on diversification and job creation as declared in the seventh national development plan.
‘’The crafters of the ECA did not undertake meaningful consultation and did not sufficiently take into consideration the Zambian economic landscape and there is evidence that submissions tendered by key stakeholders were generally ignored,’’ he said.
‘’The ECA would cause significant cost escalation for the average company in Zambia. A substantial increase in the cost of labour has been reported mainly on account of the proliferation of leave days; changes in the computation of leave entitlements; receiving of full salary during forced leave; significantly high gratuity and severance payments based on unfavourable computation formula; and adding of management in the category of employees qualified to receive overtime
payment,’’ he added.
He also suggested that the employment and labour taskforce critically reviews the conditions under which expatriate staff are engaged to ensure that the country was not disadvantaged in a fast globalising world where the notion of work as well as the domicile of the worker had fast changed and nationalism cum protectionism in employment was slowly being redefined as country boundaries were intentionally being made open in the context of regional integration and global connectedness.
And Zambia Federation of Employers executive director Harrignton Chibanda said the federation was shocked that government had paid a deaf ear on the recommendations of most stake holders and that the current ECA would choke most employers.
Chibanda predicted more job losses and less industries and that Zambia being a developing country needed to focus more on production as that was the main driver of any economy.
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Stupid Economist. Do you know the suffering of miners? You should be asking government to review the employment of expatriates instead of retrogressive cheap thinking like this.