From A Single Mother
DEAR President Hifikepunye Pohamba, I am a single mother of three working in the retail business.
Your speech on television on Workers’ Day prompted me to write this letter to you and humbly request that your office takes a serious and very close look at foreign stores operating in our country and their recruitment processes and policies.
Like the country’s domestic workers and security guards, we in the retail sector are lowly paid modern-day slaves. Slaves, because we are employed as casuals for up to five years with no prospect of permanent employment. One retail group has “permanent casual workers” who are seemingly the highest paid with a meagre basic salary of N$1000. At other major retail shops they get even less than this amount.
We work long, exhausting hours from Monday to Sunday and even on public holidays with little or no rest and no benefits. Our annual and sick leave are calculated differently to stipulations of the Namibian labour law. A case in point, when one is injured while on duty the store does nothing to assist such a person and the shortfall between the doctor’s treatment fees and the Social Security Commission’s payment has to be paid by that person.
Also if one happens to have used up sick leave days, one is required to pay the company more than three times the daily rate in compensation. Apparently there is nothing in the labour law to safeguard us from such blatant exploitation.
Please put a law in place for these companies to adhere to in order for them to be obliged to assist workers injured on duty. Please also relook at the minimum basic compensation rate for us to at least get N$3000 take-home salary.
Most of us are single parents without homes/houses of our own, who need to survive amidst the ever-increasing cost of living. After paying rent and taxi to get to work, we are left with nothing to assist our children with, let alone buy food and clothes.
Our children end up dropping out of school as we cannot afford to properly care for our children. The long working hours leave our children unsupervised and to their own devices, and the meagre pay does not help much to provide for their basic needs.
We are in a free and democratic country. Please free us from these foreign exploiters that are enslaving us and make a lot of money at our expense while we are starving.
Lowly paid shop steward
Windhoek