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Interview with Abdallahi Ould Mohammed (Nahah), General Secretary of the General Confederation of Mauritanian Workers (GTM) by Natacha David from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). ICFTU / afrol News, February 2002 - Declared a Least Developed Country (LDC) because of pervasive poverty, Mauritania is in the process of modernising its economy. However, social progress can’t seem to keep up: purchase power continues to slide; wages and working conditions have stagnated at 1980s levels and the countryside and shantytowns are poverty-stricken. In very precarious conditions themselves, trade unions struggle to pull their country out of misery and neglect. Natacha David (ICFTU) spoke recently to Abdallahi Ould Mohammed (Nahah), General Secretary of the General Confederation of Mauritanian Workers (GTM) for
an ICFTU interview. Abdallahi Ould Mohammed: Mauritania has ratified all 8 of the Fundamental ILO Conventions. However, Mauritanian trade unionists find that things are not that clean cut. There is practically no social dialogue. Meetings with the Ministry of Labour are infrequent, very limited in scope, and we are only asked to give our opinions. Employers are very reluctant to deal with unions. Social dialogue generally only takes place when workers take industrial action in the event of a labour dispute. The only exception is the industrial fishing sector where some progress has been made. In many companies, freedom of association is constantly short-circuited as a result of employer interference in union elections. This occurs quite frequently in the private sector, where union delegates are very vulnerable. Labour inspectors are very poorly paid and corruption is rampant. There are also regions that extend over 600,000 km2, in the middle of nowhere. For these regions, there is only one labour inspector, without a phone and without a vehicle! Not even the 6 to 7 labour inspectors in Nouakchott have a car or phone. Even when a labour dispute breaks out, the labour inspections are limited to arbitration. The legal environment is also verging on the hostile- rulings are often contradictory and sometimes completely ignored by companies. N.D.: What are your main demands with regard to workers rights? A.O.M.: Firstly, it is important that the public administration and industrial courts be reformed so that they can play a greater part in the settlement of labour disputes. In the Social Security system, there is a need for state health insurance, elderly programmes and a reform of the occupational medicine system. We also need to create an office of statistics (also employing UTM and CGTM members) to gather reliable employment figures. Moreover, employers should work with trade unions to raise wages. Trade unions demand that employers stop resorting to assignment-based labour contracts (because this violates labour market rules) and that there be substantial limits placed on subcontracting, especially for government procurement contracts. On the issue of privatisation of state-owned enterprises, Mauritania’s trade unionists are against what they view as a clearance sale of state-owned property. They recommend that strategic sectors remain in government hands. As far as the bill to revise the labour code is concerned, nothing much has been done to get this bill through the parliament since 1993, despite promises made to the ILO. The trade unions are trying to pressure the government into making this a priority issue. N.D.: With the high levels of unemployment, underemployment, seasonal employment and generally a particularly harsh exploitation of the workforce, the rural sector is the most directly affected by the problems of employment and poverty. How will you be able to come to their aid? A.O.M.: We are not farmers by tradition, and are even less skilled at marketing. It was only in the 80s, when the first Senegal river projects were completed that agro-business and paid agricultural employment developed. Farming equipment made it possible to use the land. Investment capital started pouring in after the agrarian reform of the 80s. A new source of economic growth emerged, at the price of widespread exploitation of workers: extremely low wages and appalling working conditions (no protection or respect for basic occupational health and safety rules). Job insecurity is another major problem, together with the lack of Social Security coverage. The CGTM is the only trade union present in the agro-business sector, our presence is still limited but we are working on it. There are roughly 40,000 paid workers employed by the agro-business sector. Due to the limited resources that trade unions have at their disposal, it is very difficult to organise workers. For one thing, we have to travel across vast stretches of land to reach them. We are also unable to provide training sessions for union officials. Workers want minimal social coverage and greater dialogue with employers. However, on an institutional level, the situation has reached a complete standstill because labour code reform has gotten bogged down.
N.D.: Along with agriculture, farming and mining, fishing is a key sector in the economy. You denounce the new fishing agreement with the European Union as endangering the survival of several species of fish and strangling the already struggling domestic fishing industry. A.O.M.: Industrial fishing is an extremely difficult sector that has experienced tremendous liberalization over the past few years. The sector is being restructured and tighter restrictions on access to the profession are being put in place. From now on, there will be a single list of job seekers to ensure greater equity. After the biological interruption in September and October, Mauritanian fishermen no longer have priority when it comes to who gets hired. Interests and speculation are enormous. Sometimes, a worker has to pay $500 just to get the job. Mauritanian fishermen who wish to work on board EU ships find it very difficult to get hired. In theory, there are quotas for Mauritanian fishermen. However, the reality of the matter is that they often cannot get on board because there is no bed available. There is cut-throat competition from labour in Morocco, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau. Fishermen working for the national fleet are very poorly paid. There are enormous differences in salary with respect to those paid by other fleets. Not to mention the issue of subcontractors who sometimes disappear without a trace, leaving their employees without a dime to show for their work. Local fishing, although not as developed as industrial fishing, provides four times more jobs than industrial fishing. There is also considerable room for plenty of jobs at the top and bottom of the fish production line. However, the socio-economic conditions of local fishermen are evidently quite difficult. Moreover, trade unions insist that there are major safety issues to be addressed since not a week goes by without there being an accident at sea. And in Mauritania, life preservers and flare guns are very hard to come by. N.D.: You also denounce the devastating effects of sub-contracting in the mining sector. A.O.M.: Subcontracting has indeed gotten out of hand. 50% of the workers were laid off and then rehired through subcontractors to do the exact same jobs. The new conditions of labour are much worse: workers receive 10 times less than they did before and have lost such benefits as housing and healthcare coverage. Subcontractors do not bring capital, tools, training nor professional skills, they merely act as intermediaries and pocket the difference. In 1999, we managed to force subcontractors to declare their workers with the Social Security Office and directly take union dues from wages. The second contentious issue in this area is the weekly rest allowance. Workers traditionally get 24 hours, but this was extended to 48 by Presidential decree in March 2001- with the exception of the mining industry. When this dispensation was announced, the CGTM organised a work stoppage. In an attempt to defuse this conflict, an interministerial committee has been set up, but the new minister is none other than a mining company executive. Trade unions have demanded 50% overtime for daytime hours and 100% for night-time hours beyond legal 40-hour working week. It is hoped that the situation will be settled soon. N.D.: How is your organisation working to fight against the rising importance of the informal sector of the economy? A.O.M.: According to very approximate figures, the informal economy employs at least one-third of the working population in Mauritania- for example, women who enhance the value of a cloth by adding painted designs before selling them. People such as these face major administrative and legal constraints. For years we have been asking the ILO to fund a study on what trade unions can do for Mauritania’s informal economy and vice versa. However, this request has so far been ignored. We created an office in charge of the informal economy during our last conference in July 2001, but this office lacks the resources it needs to accomplish this task. We would like to help the informal economy to adopt more flexible organisational structures that would fall in line with job mobility. Why not create links between co-operative structures and trade unions, like partnerships for example? Various efforts have been made along this line but there is no training for union officials on how to go about things. N.D.: Mauritania is often singled out by international human rights organisations on the issue of slavery. What is your approach to the problem? A.O.M.: Slavery is rooted in very old traditions in Mauritania and was particularly prevalent amongst nomad or quasi-nomad stockbreeders. The poverty belts around the towns are therefore populated by many former slaves who left the countryside. The key issue here is to find ways of restoring the same opportunities to all. We need to apply a positive discrimination policy in order to prevent the current poverty issue reproducing new barriers between former slaves and former masters. In practice, we have addressed the huge problem of reintegrating black workers, who may or may not have been deported to Senegal between 1989 and 1991 and have not managed to recover their rights, by grouping them into collectives, thereby creating a number of jobs and tackling the most urgent needs. We are trying to obtain cooperation funds to support our work. N.D.: With very limited social dialogue in Mauritania, you also denounce the shortage of opportunities for dialogue with the government and with the international financial institutions. How can the ICFTU help in these circumstances? A.O.M.: For more than 15 years, the trade unions have been effectively excluded from the process of social and economic reforms being undertaken under the structural adjustment programmes- such as the new strategy to fight poverty which runs from the present time until 2015. For examples such as this, we would like the ICFTU to help us become more involved- in fact, we were pleased to see that the ICFTU and its African regional organisation (AFRO) recently organised a conference with us and the UTM (another ICFTU affiliate in Mauritania) on the social dimensions of structural adjustment. The international reputation of the ICFTU has without doubt been beneficial to us in getting recognition from our government and the international financial institutions which are established in Nouakchott. It was also an opportunity to demonstrate to our Minister of Trade that the international defence of workers’ rights is in the interest of the most poor countries, such as our own. Interview by Natacha David, ICFTU
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afrol News / ICFTU
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