ZBC sweats over salary cuts

By Cyril Zenda

The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) has started making overtures to negotiate with its workers after it lost a court case in which the latter were challenging their employer’s unilateral decision to slash their salaries by more than half.

Lovemore Madhuku, the lawyer representing the 563 ZBC workers, who are up-in-arms with their management for effecting unilateral salary cuts without their consent, this week told the Financial Gazette that the public broadcaster had indicated its willingness to settle the dispute with the workers out-of court, but not before it had lost the labour case in the courts of law.

“They have indicated that they would want without prejudice discussions to see if they can come to an understanding with the workers on the matter,” Madhuku said, adding that the talks would not take away the court’s position that the decision taken by the corporation was illegal and was therefore reversed.

The dispute was precipitated by ZBC’s decision of December 2013 to unilaterally slash its workers’ salaries to the 2010 levels, which saw most of the employees losing more than half of their salaries.

The decision was made at the behest of the Ministry of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, then under Jonathan Moyo, who has since been moved to the Higher and Tertiary Education portfolio.

The ministry’s argument was that ZBC’s salary bill was bigger than its total revenue and therefore unsustainable.

The Financial Gazette understands that what is now delaying the negotiations is the absence of a workers’ committee at the company after the employees disbanded the committee in protest over the harassment of members of the previous committee that had, for the past three years, been at the forefront of fighting for the reversal of the illegal salary cut.

According to court papers gleaned by the Financial Gazette, in August last year, Nqobile Malinga and 563 others made a court application in which they sought an order reversing the workers’ salaries to their December 2013 levels.

Although ZBC entered an appearance to defend the matter, it did not file its arguments within the required time, resulting in the workers seeking to bar the corporation from filing its opposing papers.

ZBC management and board members as well as officials from the Ministry of Information made a show of running around to defend the case, but nothing happened, and in November last year, the public broadcaster was barred from opposing the application.

The court papers show that ZBC’s lawyers, Scanlen & Holderness advised their client that the case was indefensible, but its counsel was rejected, resulting in the law firm renouncing agency.

It was only this year that ZBC, with the help of another law firm, approached the High Court seeking to have the bar lifted.

However, on September 13, High Court judge Justice Owen Tagu threw out ZBC’s application for lack of merit.

“The respondents (ZBC workers) submitted that the explanation given for the default is neither true nor reasonable. They submitted that the legal opinion given by Messrs Scanlen & Holderness must have been on the futility of defending the action in HC 7272/15 and this is probably why the applicant’s erstwhile lawyers renounced agency after their advice had been rejected,” noted Justice Tagu in his written judgment made available last week.

The judge said he agreed with the workers that it was grossly unreasonable for ZBC to say that the default arose from the need to obtain legal advice some two-and-half months after having been served with the summons.

He also noted that by the time the dispute spilled into the courts, it had been simmering for more than a year.

“For these reasons, I found that the reasons given by the applicant for the default were grossly unreasonable and that the applicant did not have a bona fide defence. It was for these reasons that I summarily dismissed the applicant’s application for the upliftment of the bar.”

Last year, ZBC seized a ruling by the Supreme Court allowing employers to terminate contracts on notice to dismiss some of its workers.

The order reversing the salaries to their 2013 levels means that ZBC does not only owe current workers in backdated salaries, but those who were also retrenched up to the point they were dismissed.

The amount owing to the workers run into millions of dollars and it is the quantum of this liability that ZBC is trying to negotiate with the workers. Financial Gazette