Workers prepare flowers for export at Finlays Chemirei Farm in Kericho. FILE PHOTO | NMG
News that farming multinational James Finlay will in the next
few weeks start the process of stopping flower production in Kericho is
bad enough for an economy whose GDP growth dropped to 4.9 per cent last
year.
Finlay Flowers will have stopped flower business
in Chemirei and Tarkawet farms between May this year and December 2020,
possibly sending 2,000 workers home due to what the multinational says
is a skyrocketing labour cost tied to a chain-like industrial action.
The rising cost is making Finlay’s flowers uncompetitive in the international markets, meaning the closure decision makes sense.
But
at what cost to the Kenyan economy? We are not at any moment suggesting
that worker rights, especially commensurate pay, should be downgraded
to a footnote in the labour talks and in the quest to grow the economy,
which, according to the Treasury, should expand by at 5.5 per cent this
year.
However, we are asking the workers as represented by their
unions to rethink the emerging issue of endless strikes, go-slows and
push for better pay. There’s no better pay when an employer closes shop.
This
means that the worker unions ought to go back to the drawing board and
revise how they negotiate for better work conditions and their take-home
while keeping their jobs safe.
But, apart from
workers, the county governments, many of them have drawn grandiose
economic growth plans ought to get it right many times on attracting—and
keeping— investors to their areas.
Every county ought to be the darling of investors by coming up with right incentives.
That is how the workers, many of them drawn from the local regions, will get commensurate pay.
At
the national level, President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has designed four
pillars of growth, must lose sleep trying to lower cost of living to
help cut cost of doing business, including labour, that is sending
investors away.
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