Working conditions at a Swaziland textile factory are ‘worse
than slavery’, the kingdom’s Labour Minister Lutfo Dlamini said.
And, Dlamini told the company Kang Fa, headquartered in
Taiwan, he would report it to the Taiwan Embassy If it continued to disregard
of Swaziland’s labour laws.
Dlamini told Kang Fa Managing Director, Chang Iming, ‘What
you are doing here is worse than slavery. You are running the factory using
your own labour laws. I will report you to the Taiwan Embassy because you are
misrepresenting Taiwanese investors in the country.’
Local newspaper Times of Swaziland said Dlamini was on a ‘courtesy visit’ to the factory when he
made his remarks.
The Times
reported a workers’ representative saying, ‘Sometimes we are informed at 3pm
that salaries, which were due an hour later, would be paid at a later date.
‘Also, when you go on leave you are either replaced or
made to reapply when you return to work.’
Dlamini said, ‘When this factory was constructed, we “lied”
to the King that Swazis would be employed thus reducing poverty, but what is happening
here is not employment.’
The minister gave the director an ultimatum to either
improve working conditions or have its operating licence revoked.
There have been numerous problems in Taiwanese textile
factories in Swaziland.
There are about 25 Taiwanese-owned factories operating in
Swaziland, mostly textile and garment manufacturers, employing about 15,000
people, many at close to slave wages. There have been numerous strikes
by workers trying to get decent wages, but the pay is so poor that many
women workers are paid wages so low they are unable to feed themselves properly
and have to
resort to prostitution.
Wages in textile factories in Swaziland are so low that
companies in South Africa have threatened
to move their factories to the kingdom to avoid paying the minimum wage in
that country.
It is believed that many workers in textile factories at
present in Swaziland do not receive even the kingdom’s minimum wage that varies
between E420 (US$57) a month for an unskilled worker and E600 (US $81) a month
for a skilled worker.
A report in 2010 stated that employees in Matsanjeni
typically earned E160 a month and were forced to
turn to prostitution to survive.
Some women textile workers reported
they earned E5.50 per hour (about 85 US cents) and had to live six to a
room and three to a bed to get by. They tried to share food as the cheapest
meal for one person costs E10 and a piece of fruit costs E1.
But, wages in Swaziland were still too high, according to
Mason Ma, director and vice president of Tex Ray, a large Taiwanese textile
business with factories in Swaziland. He told reporters in 2010 that recent
increases had pushed ‘wage levels higher than in some Southeast Asian countries
such as Vietnam and Cambodia’.
In March 2012, the Swaziland
High Court supported textile company Zheng Yong when it refused to pay its
workers paid leave, after it claimed it could not afford to do so.
See also
EXPLOITATION BY TAIWAN TEXTILES
COST OF ‘FRIENDSHIP’ WITH TAIWAN
SWAZI TEXTILE PAY STRIKE ILLEGAL
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