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Hwange Power Station employees feel the mandatory stay in company site to contain COVID-19 is violation of labour rights. Image by Ngage
BY LETHOKUHLE NKOMO | @The_CBNews | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | OCT 5, 2022
To halt the spread of COVID-19, many companies implemented different strategies including making it mandatory for employees to stay in company sites. However, employees of several companies operating in Hwange feel that the measures leaned more towards violation of labour rights than just containing COVID-19.
HWANGE (The Citizen Bulletin) — The emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a lot of changes in the mining and energy industry.
Chinese companies working on the expansion project of unit 7 and 8 at the power station had to change the working conditions by isolating workers to protect them from contracting and transmitting the coronavirus.
Isaac Moyo (38), a father of two, has been working as a welder at the Hwange Power Station expansion project. He has been isolated for 3 months. He works tirelessly and has no time to visit his family in Empumalanga.
“We were put in camps. The living conditions are just not conducive because the small cabins we live in are very small and accommodate four men,” says Isaac Moyo.
“I'm not even allowed to visit my family, neither is my family allowed to visit me, whenever I miss my family I have to sneak out at night and make sure that I'm not noticed.”
Isaac Moyo, a mine worker
Moyo is among welders who have been employed at the Hwange Power Station expansion project. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company made it mandatory for workers to live at the company’s temporary cabins. Those who disobeyed the order were threatened with contract termination.
Human rights activists say the temporary cabins were not designed to accommodate people for a long time.
“The workers are crowded in these cabins. Although the cabins were designed to protect workers from going out to the community during the peak of the pandemic, the idea of being cramped in a small cabin is not conducive for fully grown men. The men also deserve a right to privacy,” says Mildred Moyo, a human rights activist based in Hwange.
The Citizen Bulletin established that the cabins only accommodate very few women who are cooks. The women who were working at the project lost their contracts because the project offered living conditions which are only suitable for the men.
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Daniel Molokele, a legislator for Hwange Central Constituency says there is a need to unpack and address the living and working conditions of workers working in the Chinese companies.
“I have heard Chinese companies employees expressing concern about the terms and conditions of the camps where they are forced to stay while they are at work. They were concerned especially during the time of lockdowns and workers were not allowed to visit their families,” says Molokele.
The Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Diamond and Allied Minerals Workers Union (ZDAMWU), Justice Chinhema, says Chinese employers have been abusing workers in the name of following the COVID-19 protocols.
“We have incidences of workers working long hours of work in unsafe environment, earn as you work system introduced by Chinese employers, casualization of labour across all mine, workers signing short term contracts when work of permanent is available, and rampant labour broking introduced by corrupt, greedy managers of big companies taking over labor at companies they manage so as to pay slave wages while they earn huge.”
Justice Chinhema, ZDAMWU Secretary General
Efforts to get a comment from one of the Chinese companies operating in Hwange were unsuccessful.
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