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Joram Nyathi Spectrum
CABINET has approved reforms or amendments to the Labour Act. That’s according to Zanu-PF spokesman Simon Khaya Moyo. That must come as cold comfort for the nearly 20 000 workers already culled by employers using termination of employment notices since the July 17 Supreme Court ruling, a

very dark day for long suffering workers.

Cold comfort because on Wednesday this week Justice Vernanda Ziyambi threw out a constitutional appeal by the Zuva Petroleum employees whose initial appeal at the Supreme Court against dismissal triggered the current tsunami, literally turning 2015 into an annus horribilis for the Zimbabwean worker.

Justice Ziyambi said the constitutional appeal was defective and a nullity in terms of Zimbabwean law.

That dismissal was itself an affirmation of an earlier finding on an indecent common law that strips the worker of his dignity and worth as a significant contributor to national economic wellbeing after it was found that he could legally be fired without need for an explanation on three months’ notice.

President Mugabe has called this common law an ass.

But the situation is worse than that, and let’s give lawyers their privilege: law is perhaps the only profession under the sun where the most significant questions of the day are always resolved by an appeal to the wisdom of the dead.

The more complex the matter, the further back we are taken into antiquity for direction into the future.

Technological advances and capabilities have only served to make it easier for its practitioners to excavate more skulls of ancient sages for their wisdom on how our societies should be ruled.

So it is that today in an independent Zimbabwe thousands of workers find themselves stripped of all “presumed” rights and privileges in the work place on the basis of some ancient English case law fossilised in cultural practices that would sound ludicrous in a modern era where principles of equity and fairness in human relationships feature more than the national anthem.

That is why a more radical approach was required to deal with this common law iniquity than the leisurely, almost sedate parliamentary route Government has chosen to deal with the genocide in the work place.

It is an approach which shows either lack of urgency or a failure to read the red danger signs flashing blindingly across the country.

The obvious logic for this legalistic approach is respect for the principle of the separation of powers.

Fair and fine on another day. But here we have a situation where the Judiciary has literally been making laws for the Executive on the hoof by way of literal interpretation of the law without seeming to care about the intention or spirit of the Legislature.

Roughly, this began with a judgment earlier this year which had the effect of legalising prostitution, where arrest or conviction for the offence now requires one of the parties to the act to make a confession to the police that they have been made to pay for sex or that they are in fact soliciting for paid sex.

Loitering on its own is no longer an offence.

Then came the prosecutor-general’s liberal comments on child sex at a time debate was raging countrywide around child marriage amid a search for an “appropriate” age for a girl child to consent to sex.

While Mr Johannes Tomana received a fitting rebuke from members of the public and the Legislature for his unfortunate remarks, the Executive was left in a lurch in terms of law enforcement.

The latest Supreme Court ruling and Constitutional Court judge Justice Ziyambi’s dismissal of a right of appeal by the former managers of Zuva Petroleum entrench a trend where the courts seem not to care about the implications and ramifications of their judgments so long as they meet the narrowest and strictest letter of the law.

In my previous contribution on the Supreme Court ruling regarding termination of employment on three months’ notice, I made reference to Justice Patel’s ruling on the land issue of 2010.

I also referred to President Zuma’s decision to let Sudan’s President Al-Bashir leave the country against an ICC warrant to have him detained.

I also gave an example where Jesus “chose” to ignore the Sabbath in the service of man.

All three are fairly distinguishable cases which occurred in different jurisdictions.

A common thread in all three cases is that those given the onerous task to make the critical decisions considered first at the implications of sticking to the letter of the law on the greater public good.

They didn’t dispute the law; they simply did what served the greater good and was humane in the circumstances and were prepared to live with the consequences.

On the contrary, it seems in Zimbabwe it is standard practice that people must always serve the law, not the other way round and the judiciary is insulated from the hideous consequences of its decisions.

This is what Justice Ziyambi said, according to media reports, in dismissing the right of appeal by Don Nyamande and Kingstone Donga, as urgent: she reportedly said the fact that several other employees had had their contracts of employment terminated as a resulted of the Supreme Court judgment was “not good enough”.

“The employees referred to are not parties to this application,” said the judge.

Given this legal armour, companies have gone on a rampage of wanton staff dismissal.

The fact that they don’t have to give reasons for their actions has made the plight of the worker worse than what was experienced under Esap in the 1990s.

That is why Government’s lackadaisical approach to this emergency is shocking.

There are companies engaging in criminal irresponsibility under cover of the Supreme Court judgment.

But more dangerous, where companies can fire workers without explanation or justification, there can be no end, no purpose and no objective.

They cannot account for their actions in retrospect if they never stated what they sought to achieve for the overall economy by firing their workers.

In other words, we have a situation on the one hand where a judge says workers being fired daily as a result of a Supreme Court judgment are “not parties” to an appeal application while on the other we have firms firing employees randomly under a blanket of “current economic challenges”.

Under this blanket cover, benefits which workers have always taken for granted such as use of company vehicle, school fees payments, housing allowances and annual bonuses have overnight been elevated to a privilege which company owners can use to extort favours, especially from female employees, new and old.

This is the new capitalism with its bloody fangs unsheathed.

We have labour market flexibility in which the labourer is exposed to the whims of a heartless master.

Indeed, the Supreme Court judgment on the status of the employee has been a bag of revelations for the Zimbabwean worker.

What is yet to be explained is the timing.