Minimum Wage Should Start With Sensitization for Proper Implementation

Recently the Parliament of Uganda passed the minimum wage act of 2015 into law. According to the passed law, an employee is currently not supposed to earn less than 130,000 Ugx.

There was some excitement from my learned friend when the news broke, he rushed to show me the article in the newspapers and he insisted the days of ‘’exploitation’’ were over through these new “law engravings.”

I genuinely wanted to join this “excitement minimum wage bandwagon” but I just couldn’t fathom how it was going to be implemented. Seeming to me to have the dressings of our usually good intentioned laws, without proper implementation stepping blocks.

The learned friend insists that now maids will not work for less than the minimum wage. Though I honestly doubt whether maids have the slightest of ideas what this minimum wage hullabaloo is all about.

My mind struggles to see it! All the neighborhood maids up in arms and protest, putting all the mingling sticks down, aprons down, ignoring all the crying babies, alas to the scrubbing brushes.

Onward marching in protest, quoting articles of the constitution, quoting slogans previously shouted by the brothers and sisters of the black conscious movement in South Africa in the early strides of the apartheid movement were thousands of black students in a bi-racial school with a majority of the school population being white randomly flooded the streets in protest, causing public uproar.

The Ugandan maid today though appears to be more interested in whether Gravity Omutujju was really shot at or not? Whether the goat was really let loose or not? (“embuzi zakutudde?”). More engulfed in whatever comment some local musician made on some local radio station.

For this law to be easily implemented therefore, first and foremost, mass awareness has to be made to those who are the key beneficiaries of it. Their rights to employment must be known to the employee.

With this new knowledge, contracts must be put in place, detailing in them employee’s account details and Tin number’s respectively, the employee’s position inclusive and the employer’s names, plus the national ID NIN numbers. Not just for the maids but for most of the casual laborers.

That way, the system would red flag whoever is trying to break the law through the payments being remitted to the various accounts, and using this system, the culprits would be brought to book.

After these above measures, we shall soon discover that the “minimum wage monster” isn’t completely dead cold and knocked out as earlier presumed, but was just merely playing dead, just like that mischievous antelope on the national geographic channel that momentarily fakes its own death.

And as the Lion is checking around and preparing to feast, boom!! the antelope jumps up into a sprint. and obviously the Lion is burned out and helplessly looks on as “minimum wage antelope” runs off.

Anyways back to the subject matter. Even with the above measures in place, a number of variables still creep in to dismantle the minimum wage. For example, during the computation of this minimum wage figure, an employer will argue, that they are providing housing, food, medical aid, clothing, small favors to relatives of the employed.

Therefore, the employer will strongly argue whether these factors were put into consideration before the flat sum of 130,000 ugx was arrived at? If not, then what were the key factors considered?

Another employer will argue that they pay their staff on a weekly, and sometimes daily basis. Hence in what computational state are they being law-abiding citizens? What numbers are needed on a weekly or daily basis to prevent a possible collision with the law?

School of thought X, will question the professionalism and quality of the labour that is being paid for, for example if there is a minimum, shouldn’t there be a minimum skill level requirement? A minimum education requirement and so on and so forth.

As long as many of these questions remain unanswered or not answered to satisfactory levels, there will always be loopholes in the implementation process of this law.

When we continue to get our employees (maids, labourers) from the villages with no substantial qualifications at all, so long as the maids keep kneeling before their employees and calling them Mummy, Taata and so on, their ability to negotiate what kind of payment they get, will always be a steep slope to climb.

Once the methods of recruiting employee’s remain rogue, clandestine and informal in nature, the wage, more so the minimum wage will forever remain a challenge. “If Nothing changes, nothing changes.”-Courtney C. Steven’s.