Labour rights under Zimbabwe’s new Constitution: The right to be paid a fair and reasonable wage

Abstract

Although the philosophical basis of the Labour Act3 is pluralist, with the Act providing that its “purpose is to advance social justice and democracy in the workplace,”4 the regime covering wages has been decidedly unitarist. Hitherto neither statutes nor common law had prescribed the quantum of wages payable to employees. This, despite perhaps one of the most rallying demands of labour in the last two decades being the demand for a Poverty Datum Line-linked living wage. This is understandable, when one considers that by 2011, nearly 93 per cent of formal sector employees were earning wages less than the Total Consumption Poverty Line (TCPL), the generally accepted measurement of poverty.5 Thus, for most workers, a living wage remains a mirage. They are mired in dire and debilitating poverty.