What are workers' rights in Uganda really like?Rory Mizen

On paper, Uganda is a great place to work: active trade unions, generous employee compensation, equal opportunities and strong labour laws. In companies of over fifteen workers, employers are legally responsible for contributing towards their employees’ national insurance and pension schemes. Staff members are entitled to six days off per calendar month (usually all Sundays plus two Saturdays), and they should be paid overtime. Especially for Africa, these are enviably progressive laws, and one can imagine that much (well-publicised) parliamentary time was dedicated to resolving such a critical issue. However, these meticulously researched, drafted and ratified papers remain purely theoretical: in reality, they are about as relevant to workers as Fermat’s Last Theorem. 

Imagine if I were to tell you that a packet of sweets should be divided equally between you and your friends. I describe no punishment should you not do this, and while I look on, I allow you to take all the sweets for yourself. Where is the law? Where is my authority? Who is representing your cheated friends? Now, imagine if I were to tell you that your employees should not work on Sundays; but when I take my weekly Sunday walk, and see all of your workers, in uniform, shovelling gravel, I shrug and keep walking. I don’t re-evaluate my law; I don’t implement policing measures; I don’t make an impassioned speech in parliament; I don’t really care, because the elections were last year and I won. I don’t really care because the most exploited workers – the people these laws are designed to protect – are illiterate, and have never been informed of the rights that I gave them. I just don’t really care – and, unsurprisingly, neither do the nation’s employers.

I spent the last week implementing a company payroll for the SME I am here consulting. Dutifully inputting the salaries into an Open Office spreadsheet, on a slow and battered donated desktop PC, even I (with my limited grasp of local currency) had to do a double-take. You know how Cambridge students have spent the past couple of years valiantly striving to enforce a standardised cross-college living wage? Well, here there is no legal minimum wage. In my business, at least, I figured out that our workers earn, on average, 175,000 Ugandan Shilling (UGX) per month. Therefore, at the current exchange rate (£1 = roughly 5,500 shillings), they earn £31.57 a month. Under what should be a six-day standard working week, this works out at roughly £1.30 a day. For intense physical labour.

You’re probably thinking that Kampala is cheaper to live in than Cambridge and, obviously, you’d be spot on, but it’s not that cheap. I receive a stipend to cover travel, water and other expenses while at work. As we are living with our Ugandan counterparts in host homes, we don’t need to think of rent, utilities, breakfast or dinner, yet our weekly allowance of 100,000 shillings (around £18.04) has been depleted by Friday. I don’t know, perhaps we’re just living extravagantly. I do regularly buy imported Weetabix.

What is disturbing is how lovely our business owner is: humble, friendly, thoughtful and honest. He buys me and my counterpart a takeaway lunch everyday; the most delicious chicken in a fragrant tomato sauce with an orange-spiced rice. We are bought crates of expensive bottled water, and his production manager brings us tea, coffee and Ugandan chapattis for ‘break tea’ at 10.30 every morning. As consultants, the owner’s forthcoming attitude and frank appraisal of his failures (shockingly, his biggest issue is ‘high staff turnover’) makes for easy work. We have been made to feel very comfortable: so what about the people who are physically producing his product?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out: Uganda’s youth unemployment rate is consistently high, and it is the youngest country in the world. There is a whole lot of young men who need to make a living, and a whole lot of young men to replace them when the going gets tough. Our business owner is not alone in seeing the young as completely desperate, and completely disposable. Don’t want to work on Sundays? You don’t have to work at all. Don’t want to load and unload trucks for no additional pay? How about no pay, everyday? (Actually, I’m interning for free in a third-world country so… lesson?).

Have no fear, reader: I shall put the world to rights. Next week I am drafting an ‘employee welfare’ proposal, which I am in no doubt will change his entire culturally-ingrained attitude to Uganda’s working class overnight. Obviously. I can be puh-retty persuasive. Before you know it Christmas bonuses will be a thing in East Africa, and there will be a national worker’s holiday in my name. I live in hope.

But allow me to part the clouds for a few bright rays of Ugandan sunshine: there are businesses who are taking it upon themselves to make a positive social impact. In fact, the charity for whom I’m consulting endeavours to find and support exactly those kinds of businesses, their owners and employees – it’s just that, in my case, the boss either lied about his ethical intentions or he just needs a little re-education (Is that patronising? It definitely is. I don’t really care).

For example, a fellow volunteer is supporting a single mother in starting an organic fertiliser company; last week I mentioned that although 90% of Ugandans work in the agriculture sector, currently only 4% of the nation’s farmland is irrigated. They have incredibly low mechanisation, and fertiliser usage is barely 10% of the world’s average. This is important because Uganda’s exports in anything other than coffee and tea are practically non-existent (and even those two are relatively slight). In UK supermarkets, you will find that the green beans have been imported from Kenya, Uganda’s neighbour; same climate, same terrain, different attitude. A small thing like encouraging farmers to use organic fertiliser can improve the quality of the produce enough to entice fruit and vegetable importers. Trust me, the quality of fruit and veg here is naturally decent, obviously – but it could be so much better. Even the mangoes are a disappointment.

Export equals better pay, which means larger farms, more employees – and a change in the government’s attitude towards subsidising farming.

I want to leave you with a summer reading recommendation: A Good African Story by Andrew Rugasira. A small coffee company wants to pay decent wages, provide a safe and hygienic work environment and create a strong and valued community. They become the most successful brand from Uganda – you can even buy their coffee in Waitrose.

I will leave my copy as a parting gift to my boss. Hint, hint.