As General Secretary of COTU-Kenya, what is your view on the situation of workers’ rights in your country?
Francis Atwoli: The situation of workers’ rights in my country is appalling because we are not getting enough of the support that we are supposed to get from the Government and the industrial relations practice has been 100 per cent left to trade unions and employers to regulate by themselves. The Government is ill-equipped and the Ministry of Labour is badly funded, and for such reasons we do not have effective labour inspection and administration being carried out and implemented by the Ministry of Labour, as it is required. So in other areas where we do not have strong trade union representation, exploitation is the order of the day and more hours – through the introduction of precarious employment, casualization with workers on contracts, and piecemeal jobs and a system of work that is not properly regulated, and therefore the protection of workers’ rights is in jeopardy in Kenya as far as the poor budgetary allocation to the Ministry of Labour is concerned. Also the Ministry of Labour lacks a lot of facilities to facilitate the required labour inspection and administration: 1) they do not have enough vehicles; 2) they do not have enough Officers – and those who are there were trained more 20-30 years ago – people who are almost retiring.
We require young labour inspectors, and we require people who can prosecute employers on issues of not adhering to the ILO’s international labour standards and local legislation, as well as other areas that are lacking. For example, we require inspection in areas of wages and also other areas. We want the Ministry to be supportive and to introduce wages and income policy and employment policy in areas that will lead to the creation of employment for the young people in Kenya. This is really what is wanted in Kenya because the Ministry of Labour is poorly funded and the trade unions are not 100 per cent supported by the Government and this leaves a lot of loopholes to exploitation by our senior brothers –politicians etc – particularly in areas of social protection, in the funding of the national insurance fund etc for the purposes of getting out the badly-required funds for workers and so on, and increasing rates of contribution very bitterly and without wide and prior consultation with the social partners etc against ILO Convention No. 144.
Do you have any expectations vis-à-vis the ILO in the framework of the promotion and respect of international labour standards in your country?
Francis Atwoli: If they do not respect and honour our own five sets of local labour laws that we have – which are very good – they do not respect them, and neither do they respect the industrial relations’ practitioners, for example, you might have heard that they criminalized an issue which is in our national Constitution relating to strikes etc and they had to arrest me! These are unfair labour practices and these days excessive power by those who are charged with the responsibilities of running Constitutional offices. They have misused their powers to make sure that the voices of those who have been elected speak for the voiceless are turned down – this is very bad, and internationally unacceptable. If they can do that then they cannot honour and respect our local labour regulations and laws, local laws, how would they be in a position to respect the International Labour Organization’s labour standards? This was worse, particularly when they knew that I had been elected as the Vice President at the ILO of the International Labour Conference, which raised the status of our country internationally, and going back home nobody wants to look into my trade union history , and industrial relations’ history, and the modern management techniques that I have applied, and they went ahead and arrested me and asked me to go to Court, and then find me close to US dollars six thousand ($6,000) – where would workers get such a colossal amount of money? And this is just for something at the back of their minds: that they do not respect international labour standards.
Talking about COTU’s activities now – COTU-Kenya is very involved in the eradication of child labour. According to you, what solutions do you recommend to protect children and facilitate the application of ILO Conventions such as No. 182?
Francis Atwoli: Actually when Convention No. 182 came into being, we were the first people in Kenya to celebrate, because I happened to be the General Secretary of the Kenyan Plantation and Agricultural Workers’ Union; and the headquarters of children’s abuse were the plantations – those children who were supposed to go to school were forced to work in the plantations; and I can assure you that the support we received from the ILO (IPEC) – we did a commendable job with employers and workers to so immensely reduce the amount of abuse in this particular area of child labour. We would like the ILO to redouble its efforts in this area so that we can move on. Also, as I mentioned, this is an area where the Government is supposed to exert its pressure and raise child labour awareness, but simply when the Government does not have the facilities, when it does not allocate enough funds and work out a budget that can support the Ministry of Labour and make sure that the labour officers etc are everywhere on inspection, then in other areas that we are not able to reach then we still have child labour persisting. That is why I am appealing to the ILO to come up with a programme, such as the one we had under ILO (IPEC) that supported the elimination of child labour. We also echo the production by those countries that supported Convention No. 182 issues and the termination of child labour globally.
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