The State of Social Dialogue

Uganda

The State of Social Dialogue

The supreme law, the 1995 Uganda Constitution under 29(e) states that every citizen shall have the “freedom of association which shall include the freedom to form and join associations or unions, including trade unions and political and other civic organizations”. Workers have the rights to form or join a trade union of his or her choice for the promotion and protection of his or her economic and social interests; to collective bargaining and representation; and to withdraw his or her labor according to law. By law, the National Organization of Trade Unions (NOTU) is the sole federation to which all national unions affiliate. Together with their Kenyan and Tanzanian trade union counterparts, Ugandan trade unionists formed the East African Trade Union Consultative Council in 1988. NOTU is itself affiliated to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The enactment of the Trade Union Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) Statute of 1993 allowed for the unionization of some grades of civil servants, medical workers and teachers, and the employees of the Bank of Uganda who were hitherto not allowed to form or belong to unions. By the same amendment three places were reserved for workers in the interim national assembly, the National Resistance Council. The number was increased to five in 2001. Two workers’ representatives were also part of the Constituent Assembly that debated and promulgated the new national constitution in 1995.

Uganda has ratified five of the eight core ILO conventions - Convention No. 98 on the right to organize and collective bargaining, Convention No. 29 and 105 on forced labor and Convention No. 138 and 182 on child labor. It has however not ratified Convention No. 87 on freedom of association and the right to organize. Under national legislation it is a requirement that only a minimum of 1,000 workers can form national union. Besides, in order to have a union recognized in a workplace, it must provide proof that it represents 51 percent of the workforce. NOTU’s traditional membership base is the formal sector, which has seen a downward trend as a major employer. The privatization and/or closures of state owned enterprises, a large informal sector and retrenchments of workers from the municipal authorities have all contributed to diminishing NOTU’s membership. Labor being a department under a much larger Ministry of Gender, Labor and Community Development, it has to compete for resources from an already small basket. For instance in the 2003/2004 financial year, while 12.8 percent of the budget estimates was allocated to “Security”, 7.7 percent to was earmarked for “Economic Functions and Social Services” from which various ministries, including the Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, draws resources. Organs for tripartite dialogue do meet occasionally but their views are advisory and do not necessarily become government policy. Representing slightly over 100,000 (about 5 percent of the workforce) workers in a country where the majority live and earn their living in the rural countryside, trade unions remain at the periphery in influencing policies.

In September 2001 the Ministry of Gender, Labor and Community Development banned all trade union meetings and elections due to alleged contravention of some provisions of the Trade Union Decree of 1975, which ban was only lifted in April 2003. The Trade Union Decree is among a set of labor laws – on employment, occupational health and safety and arbitration - due for revision, which process has however stalled due to objections from the Deregulation Project, an advisory unit in the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MFPED). In October 2002, NOTU published a rejoinder to the Policy and Strategy Framework for Labor Regulation by the Deregulation Project urging government to expedite the labor law review process.

Trade Union participation in the PRSP Process

The country-led Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) was formulated in 1997 after a consultative process of preparation from November 1995. The revised PEAP was eventually accepted as the country’s PRSP in May 2000. Uganda has so far produced two annual reports - in 2001 and 2002. The August 26, 2002 JSA commends the Ugandan authorities for involving representatives from the private sector, NGOs, donors, elected officials, and other CSOs in the preparation of the 2002 report, an improvement compared to the previous period.

Under the umbrella of the NGO Forum, CSOs took an active part in the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative that generated recommendations for changes in adjustment policies. At the initial stages of the PEAP, their involvement was also sought by government and were involved in the Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Project which had collected views of the poor. At the formulation of the PRSP, national and international NGOs were part of CSOs invited to participate. The Uganda Debt Network (UDN) and Oxfam (Uganda) spearheaded the exercise by organizing civil society workshops in order to lay out the framework for CSO participation. The eventual formation of the CSO Taskforce, under the leadership of the UDN, was to prove groundbreaking in that it was through this organ that CSO inputs could be channeled to government. The CSO Taskforce carried out consultations with various groups including the disabled, women, youth elderly, religious leaders and community leaders.

Labor unions - NOTU and its affiliates - were not part of the CSO group, though invited by the CSO Taskforce[1]. Much later in 2000, in a meeting with President Museveni, did NOTU protest its non-involvement in the PRSP process. In its 2003 May Day speech the NOTU leadership asked to be included. Upon writing to the MFPED requesting, NOTU was eventually invited to participate in the PRSP review. NOTU is represented on the Ministry of Gender, Labor and Community Development’s four PEAP working committees – social protection, gender, employment and labor, and culture. NOTU’s paper – “Integrating Employment and Labor Productivity into Uganda’s PEAP” - welcomes the participatory nature of the PRSP process in Uganda, but urge for the inclusion of employment, labor standards, labor productivity, equitable income distribution and adequate social security protection. NOTU calls on the authorities to “devise ways and means of creating more jobs but at the same time consider the aspect of quality of such jobs created”. Since the PEAP’s second pillar is on good governance and security, NOTU would like to have labor standards enshrined in the document in order to guarantee better terms and conditions for workers. On income distribution NOTU’s concern is that “that most poor people are poor not because that they do not work, but because their labor does not offer them with adequate means to make them come out of poverty”, hence the need to have adequate equity policies in place, particularly targeted at peasant engaged in subsistence farming as well as laborers who are employed in the commercial agricultural firms. The paper also calls for the liberalization of the social security system in order to allow in many players from which workers can make a choice. Other recommendations are i) assistance to the retrenched workers to compete for the available job opportunities and businesses in both new and privatized companies; ii) formulation of an employment policy; iii) facilitation of the Labor Inspectorate Department; and abolition of Graduated Tax.

Government has earmarked service delivery and monitoring of the PRSP as the two main areas where civil society should play a role[2]. The UDN for instance is involved in monitoring of the Poverty Action Fund by empowering communities to monitor the implementation of programs that directly benefit the poor. Other CSOs are represented on sector working groups.

Labor Content of the PRSP

The PEAP is established on four major pillars, namely (i) Creating a framework for economic growth and transformation; (ii) Ensuring good governance and security; (iii) Directly increasing the ability of the poor to raise their incomes; and (iv) Directly increasing the quality of the life of the poor. The PEAP identifies unemployment as one of the dimensions of poverty. Expanding smallholder agriculture and increasing employment in industry and services are seen as ways through which the poor could participate in growth.Generating non-farm employment in rural areas is recognized in the PEAP. The credence given to the Plan for the Modernization of Agriculture is seen as playing a central role in poverty-eradication through the creation of gainful on farm and off-farm employment opportunities.

Strategies towards employment outside agriculture include provision of micro-finance, advisory services, micro- and small-scale enterprises (SME) and vocational training. So far the Micro-Finance Forum has developed an outreach program, which includes an institutional capacity-building framework for micro-finance institutions. This in turn has been endorsed by the MFPED and was submitted to Cabinet for approval in February 2002. The Micro-finance Deposit-taking Institutions Bill was also tabled in Parliament in February 2002, which bill, inter alia, provides for the licensing, regulation and supervision of micro-finance business in Uganda.

Under tertiary education, the PEAP puts a target of 90 percent employment rate post-qualification and 30 percent improvement in completion rates is seen as an improvement in quality of tertiary education. An annual expenditure of Uganda Shillings 40 billion is earmarked for the construction of 850 polytechnics at sub-county-level, aimed at training 100,000 by 2003. Macroeconomic incentives that involve labor-intensive investments are encouraged. The PEAP identifies labor-intensive methods of road-building as not only financially cheaper than other methods but also as significantly contributing to employment generation.

[1] Gariyo, Zie. 2001. “Civil Society and Global Finance in Africa: The PRSP Process in Uganda”, prepared as a chapter for the forthcoming book on Civil Society and Global Finance, edited by Jan Scholte, et al.

[2] Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development. March 2002. Summary of Background to the Budget 2001/02: Uganda Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper Progress Report 2002.