Press Release:
Partners: TUCTA, Labour Commissioner, and Wageindicator Foundation.
Drawing from the experiences of Kenya and Ghana, Tanzania becomes the third African Country in the world to launch an online Minimum Wage
Compliance initiative. These compliance forms will be offered for use to workers and employers of the general public on the website of Mywage.org/tanzania. Participants in this initiative are Trade Union Congress of Tanzania (TUCTA), Labour Commissioner of Tanzania (representing the government of United Republic of Tanzania) and Wageindicator Foundation from Amsterdam.
From a research conducted by the Department of Economics of the University of Dar es Salaam, it was found that approximately 30% of workers in Tanzania earn below the minimum wage. Therefore, the idea is to use this Complaint Form in order to alleviate the plight of those working individuals who are in defiance of the law, not even paid the minimum wage that they are legally entitled to. Another frequent illegal occurrence on the Tanzanian labour market is working excessively long hours. In practice it is hard to remedy such unjust situations. The legal route is not taken lightly and usually a long one. More so, Minimum Wage and Labour Laws information seems difficult to get by. However, since 2001 this has been made easily accessible on the Wageindicator website (Mywage.org/tanzania). And now there is the Complaint form on this website, with its focus on the two most pressing problems faced by workers. These two issues are; non-payment of minimum wages and working longer hours. Thus, the compliance form helps to speed up and spread compliance with the law hence facilitating access to justice.
How does the Complaint Form function? The procedure is so simple. Search for the online Complaint Form from the websites listed above, fill it and submit it. The technical team of Wageindicator works on daily basis to create an overview of all the complaint forms to the project partner (TUCTA). This speeds up the dispute resolution in a tremendous way. Need may arise for some cases to be resolved by the Labour Commissioner but the main purpose of the Complaint Forms is to mediate (Employers and Employees) on a faster scale with a better overview of complaints.
Workers who fill up the Complaint Forms online are much more sure of proper payments than ever before after the mediation. A solution takes a few days instead of years.
The appeal of this procedure is that it is fast, does not entail a lot of paper work and - crucial – that it is endorsed by all important institutions in the field of labour relations. It may also be used o locate hotspots of workers injustice in Tanzania. The Tanzanian initiative will be keenly observed in its pilot stage and more experiences will be drawn from the success rates of the first movers (Kenya and Ghana)
WageIndicator, thanks to its global outreach, would disseminate any proven best practices and further their acceptance in dozens of other countries around the world where it has full-fledged operations. WageIndicator Foundation was launched in 2001 to contribute to a more transparent labour market for workers and employers. The Foundation collects, compares and shares labour market information through (online & offline) surveys and desk research. It serves as an online library for wage information, labour laws and career advice. WageIndicator is a non-profit network assisted by a group world-renowned universities (among which we have University of Amsterdam, University of Harvard and University of Dar es Salaam), trade unions, employers’ organisations media and millions of users and contributors in 80 countries in the world. Its international staff consists of some 100 specialists worldwide. Wageindicator Foundation is a global organization reaching millions on hourly and daily basis. In Tanzania WageIndicator is co-coordinated by TUCTA (Mywage.org/Tanzania) and ATE (Africapay.org/Tanzania).