The Zimbabwe government which today failed to reach a salary agreement with its workers is going ahead with paying them cushioning allowances ranging from $400 to 750 with effect from tomorrow.
The government offered civil servants a 97 percent salary increase which would have seen the lowest paid worker earning $2 033 a month but unions representing the workers turned down the offer.
“The government must respond to our position paper presented to them in 2019 whose substantive demand is that the October 2018 salary of USD475-00 for the lowest paid civil servant is multiplied by the going interbank rate,” the unions said.
“An interbank rated salary is the only way to restore the value of wages and any other intervention will not work given the hyper-inflationary environment which negates any RTGS Dollar increase.”
Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said there were always disagreements when people were negotiating but the government was making sure that civil servants are paid decent salaries.
He said the government was likely to follow last year’s pattern where it awarded civil servants a cushioning allowance, then salary adjustments in April and July followed by a bonus in November.
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