Zimbabwe: Give Social Contract a Chance
 |
 Published by the government of Zimbabwe |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
The Herald (Harare)
EDITORIAL
8 August 2008
Posted to the web 8 August 2008
Harare
RESERVE Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Dr Gideon Gono's call last week for a six-month freeze on price and salary increases as part of measures to contain inflation appears to be a lone voice in the wilderness.
The governor said if the current trend in increasing prices, exchange rates, interest rates, salaries and wages on a daily basis and at times on an hourly basis, continued, there would be soon no economy to talk about while employers would not be able to pay workers' wages.
Only yesterday, we carried a story where salaries for workers in the commercial sector will rise 60-fold.
This follows a collective bargaining agreement between the National Employment Council and the Commercial Workers' Union.
We agree that workers are suffering as the cost of living bites deeper owing to inflation and that salaries have been eroded.
Workers cannot afford to buy basic goods.
Workers can be awarded such "astronomical" salary increments but by the end of the day nothing would have been solved.
It will be one sector after another giving these salaries and at the same time inflation also shooting up as employers have to increase prices of their goods and services to meet the wage bill.
There has to be some agreement on wages and prices. These should be at par.
In any economy, everything works together as workers expect to be paid enough to afford the things that they need for self-sustenance.
However, we agree with the governor that fixing salaries or prices is not a panacea to removing inflationary pressures, but the moratorium would set a foundation for a stable and predictable pricing model.
We, therefore, call on businesses to support the governor's call. Prices have to freeze first, then followed by incomes.
Once this is done, it will help incomes close the gap that has been created by rapid price movements and then increase the purchasing power parity.
A lot has been said and written about the social contract.
The three major players - labour, business and Government - to the social contract have always expressed mixed feelings on what they think should be done to resolve the mounting challenges.
While we agree that the social contract may not be the ultimate solution to the current economic problems, we feel the three parties need to give it much more serious consideration.
Every partner needs to lay their cards on the table.
On its part, Government, which is already doing its best, needs to create an enabling environment for business to thrive.
It needs to put in place the right incentives to enable business to continue investing and to remain viable.
Businesses, on the other hand, exist to make money and to create employment, but not at the expense of the society in which they operate.
Workers have over the years continued to suffer as their salaries have been eroded by inflation. They are always demanding more money to catch up with the rising cost of inflation.
The fight against inflation should not be left to one institution, but everyone should be involved.
Growing more, mining more, making more, selling more and exporting more will, so long as the rewards from this activity are fairly distributed, go a long way in fixing Zimbabwe's economic challenges.
Read comments. Write your own.
|
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright © 2008 The Herald. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Make allAfrica.com your home page
|
RSS Feed
Sign up for FREE daily 'top headlines' by email >> | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | My Account | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
