   |
|
afrol.com / AENS, 23 November - Swaziland's upper house of parliament, the Senate, approved urgent amendments to the country's controversial Industrial Relations Act on Wednesday, in a last-ditch attempt to stave off threatened US trade sanctions. The US has already excluded Swaziland from trade benefits under the recently passed Africa Growth and Opportunity Act and is threatening to expel the country from the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) unless it scraps labour regulations it views as repressive by November 30. The GSP trade scheme allows some Swaziland goods to enter the US market duty-free, and is crucial for attracting foreign direct investment into the small landlocked kingdom. Swaziland enterprise and employment minister, Senator Lutfo Dlamini, lodged urgent amendments to two disputed sections of the Industrial Relations Act on Wednesday and appealed for their immediate approval. The amendments remove a clause holding workers and their unions financially and criminally liable for any material or other losses caused by both legal and illegal strikes. US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Susan Rice, warned in a letter last month that clause was a serious restriction on the right to strike or take protest action. She insisted that workers and their organisations should be immune from civil liability as long as protest action was lawful. Rice also warned that the Act's recognition of employer appointed workers' councils as labour unions in effect created a dual structure at each workplace with equal bargaining rights. "There is serious concern that workers' councils would not be immune to employer control and that they could be used to interfere with, or bypass representative trade unions and debilitate the overall union movement," she said. Other major US concerns included the Act's requirement that every proposed strike be subjected to a vote by all union members. The stipulation would, Rice said, be tantamount to calling for a national referendum. "Such an onerous procedure would render the exercise of the right to protest action extremely difficult, if not impossible, in practice," she said. Minister Dlamini told the Senate on Wednesday that labour organisations and their individual members would now only be liable for civil or criminal charges if they committed criminal, malicious or negligent acts such as vandalism during strikes. He also said the Act's clauses on workers' councils had been changed allow councils to be established only where there were no registered trade unions or staff associations. The amendments, which were approved without objection, come after a week of discussions with an International Labour Organisation (ILO) delegation which visited Swaziland last week. Delegation members, ILO freedom of association legal advisor Shauna Olney-Senior and Cape Town's Institute of Development and Labour Law director Evance Kalula, have not yet publicly commented on the amendments. Swaziland Labour Commissioner Joshua Mndzebele confirmed on Wednesday evening, however, that the country's umbrella Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU) and other labour groups were not entirely happy with the amendments. Local US Embassy officials were not immediately available for comment.
|
