Zimbabwe’s main labour body on Monday called for a three-day strike this week to protest a recent fuel price increase, and threatened to order an indefinite work stoppage unless the government reverses the price hikes.
Last week the government almost trebled the pump price of petrol, which immediately prompted an outcry from the country’s biggest union, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU).
The labour body has said the increases make it impossible for the average worker to pay commuter fares.
It announced on Monday that it was going to call on its members to stage ”a peaceful three-day stayaway from Wednesday 23 April to Friday 25 April 2003”.
”The fuel price increases are not acceptable and the ZCTU demands that the government reverse the price increase with immediate effect,” ZCTU President Lovemore Matombo said in a statement Monday.
”Unless the government gives in to the above demand the job boycott will be indefinite,” Matombo added.
Earlier, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo was quoted in a newspaper as saying that the government was looking at measures, including a review of salaries, to cushion workers from the latest fuel price increases.
”We must endure the pain designed to make our living better,” Moyo was quoted by the state-controlled Herald as saying in justification of the price hikes.
Erratic fuel supplies to the southern African nation over the past three years have worsened in recent months due to an acute shortage of foreign exchange needed to import the commodity.
Moyo said that the government had not unilaterally increased the price of fuel, the hikes having been decided on by a national forum — the Tripartite Negotiating Forum (TNF) — grouping labour, business and government.
He said measures to cushion workers, which included a review of salaries frozen earlier this year, would ”have to be finalised and adopted as a matter of urgency”.
But the ZCTU’s Matombo said on Monday that the labour body would be pulling out of TNF-organised talks with government and business, even after the three parties had agreed to a minimum wage for the country’s workers.
”The TNF minimum wage of 46 000 Zimbabwe dollars ($56) has been overtaken by events,” Matombo said.
The labour body’s call for a job stayaway is not directly linked to a similar call for further mass action by the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Last month the MDC called a job stayaway to protest alleged misgovernance by President Robert Mugabe’s government. The strike was widely followed and shut down urban centres across the country.
In a statement Monday the MDC said the labour body was ”completely justified and deserves the support of every progressive Zimbabwean” for its strike call.
A day after the fuel price rises were announced last week, the MDC called them ”astronomical, bizarre and shocking” and said they proved that the government was ”clueless on how to address the economic ills” of the country.
The opposition party said the price hikes could lead to the collapse of Mugabe’s government.
Police spokesperson Wayne Bvudizijena was quoted in Monday’s Herald as saying the proposed ZCTU work stoppage was illegal. He said the police were prepared to deal with any disturbances. – Sapa-AFP