Building a Labor Movement in a Failed State: The Case of Zimbabwe

Bernard Pollack

The ZCIEA organizes a meeting at an AIDS orphanage outside of Harare, March 2010.

In 2000, the Zimbabwean government enacted land reform policies which allowed for the seizure and redistribution of white-owned commercial farms. These fast-track land reforms made all acquired land state land, with settlers having the right only to occupy and use it. The land reform policies have left about 1.5 million farm workers without a source of income as farms are divided up—with many tracts given to Robert Mugabe’s supporters.

While Zimbabwe’s land reform movement was initially intended to reduce the number of white-owned farms in the country and provide land to the landless, it’s done little to help the poor in rural areas. “Land was taken from the rich and given to the rich,” says Gertrude Hambira, general secretary of the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ).¹ The rich farmers have not, however, efficiently utilized the land because they are already well off and choose to hold onto the land to maintain political power. This has led to lower agricultural productivity, higher prices for food, and widespread hunger. These conditions are compounded by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country. The incidence of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe is one of the highest in the world, with about one-third of the adult population affected. Many families in Zimbabwe support orphans and many households have become female-headed or child-headed as a result of HIV/AIDS deaths, now running at over three thousand people per week.

These combined crises, in large part, hastened an end to the single-handed, three-decades-long rule of Robert Mugabe. In 2008, Morgan Richard Tsvangirai—with support from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)—was elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, ending three decades of Mugabe’s exclusive reign. Prior to this post, Tsvangirai had been the general secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The ZCTU had been growing strong, fighting for more rights and better wages for workers since the early 1990s, and firmly opposing the Mugabe government. Mugabe’s government participated in voter intimidation and suppression, and routinely arrested and jailed opposition activists. Mugabe implemented many policies that weakened Zimbabwe’s economy and dramatically worsened workers’ quality of life. Among those policies, land “reform” enacted in 2000 gave complete control of the land to the government, and left informal workers—who had largely depended upon farming—without a stable income.

However, Tsvangirai’s election to prime minister was hampered by government-sponsored attacks on his supporters. After Tsvangirai won the first round, Mugabe won the second round through election fraud, forcing the three parties involved in the elections—Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, Tsvangirai’s MDC, and an MDC faction supporting Arthur Mutambara—to sign a power-sharing agreement that reapportioned the allocation of ministries. The pact was made to create an even distribution of power between Mugabe’s party and opposition groups. As prime minister, Tsvangirai oversees a council of ministers which supervises a thirty-one-member cabinet headed by Mugabe.² However, the biggest concern for many Zimbabweans is whether the parties in the new government will put aside their differences in order to address the nation’s grave economic problems.

Labor leaders in Zimbabwe are routinely followed, arrested, and beaten. Unemployment hovers above 90 percent for Zimbabwe’s population of over twelve million, and antiunion legislation is routinely proposed and enacted. The Constitution of Zimbabwe does not incorporate the right to strike or the right to freely collectively bargain.³ The procedural requirements for a legal strike in Zimbabwe “are so convoluted that there has never been, since Independence in April 1980, one legal strike in Zimbabwe.”⁴ Therefore, the ZCTU plays an increasingly important role in empowering and improving conditions for informal workers, who constitute 80 percent of the workforce in Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU)

The ZCTU, an umbrella body of all labor unions in Zimbabwe...