Prime
Paying fair wage isn’t charity
Social media has been awash with talk that a popular restaurant chain favoured by Kampala’s middle class allegedly pays their waiters/waitresses a paltry Shs180,000 a month. It is alleged that this same restaurant made a net profit in nine figures in 2018. I want to use this opportunity to look at a bigger picture about wage exploitation.
One thing is clear. Employment is not a favour conferred on an employee by an employer. An employment relationship is an engagement where an employee performs work under certain conditions in return for remuneration from their employer. Rights and obligations are established for both parties in this regard. Ideally, a worker should be able to offer their labour and be paid a commensurate wage relative to the value they add to a company, among other things.
However, in a society with multiplicities of biases interwoven with a capitalist culture, measuring value becomes quite subjective. This means that if you have little social power - when you are poor, living with disability, uneducated, Black, a migrant or a woman - the value ascribed to the work you do may be eroded because of your placing in society, and in turn, so are your wages.
These groups are at the mercy of their potential employers, who dangle threadbare wages before them, comfortable in the knowledge that if they do not want the job, another desperate person will take it.
One claim that has been used to justify low wages for workers, especially those in the service industry, is that they take tips that augment their earnings. This argument is irredeemably flawed. First, it overestimates the generosity of customers assuming that they will be magnanimous enough to make up for shortfalls in earnings by workers. Second, tipping in Uganda is not mandatory.
So in this case, we have a classic case of employers reneging on their obligation to pay a wage commensurate to the labour offered by the employee and transferring the responsibility (and guilt) to customers. If you have taken an Uber or used other rideshare companies, you have definitely been conflicted at the point of payment when your bill came up to a measly Shs5,000 after a 20-minute ride. So you do one of two things to avoid eye contact and exit quickly, or tell the driver to keep the change. All the while, their parent company remains unbothered.
So we return to the crux of the matter. Is it the responsibility of an employer to ensure that the amount paid to an employee is sufficient to afford adequate shelter, food, and other basic necessities? Alternatively, we could ask, would the employer still be in business without the input of their employees? Probably not. Paying a fair wage is, therefore not charity, but the fulfilment of a contractual obligation, and a moral imperative under those terms.
So how do we fix this? We can start with initiating pay transparency where employees’ wages can be visible to others internally or externally. This does two things - employers are held accountable by being shamed into paying competitive rates, and workers are emboldened to ask for more, if they are all similarly disenfranchised. Of course, an argument that a fair wage is the right thing to do will not work for everyone in this dog-eat-dog society.
The indispensability of a minimum wage law then becomes apparent. The President who declined to sign into law the Minimum Wage Bill passed by Parliament earlier year, should therefore rethink his decision. Workers’ welfare and dignity depends on it!
Leah Eryenyu,
[email protected]
