Poor Work Culture

Land by itself can not yield much value to any one planning to go and live off grid. Unless you have machinery to use on the land, your efforts will amount to little or nothing. Labour in form of people especially young men would be of great help. However, in Africa’s rural areas especially in Zambia, most youths are accustomed to what is referred to as piece works. People under this piece work contract expects to be paid on every piece of work they do. They expect to go home with some pay. This kind of work culture is very bad for development as it will be shown in this article.

There are two aspects we are going to look at: from the investor’s point of view and the piece worker’s point of view. Lets start from the investor’s point of view. As an investor or simply say someone going to live in the rural area, there is a set budget prepared for the works ahead. It is not like you have a stream of unlimited resource (unless otherwise), although that is how the rural dwellers will view you: you will need to set measures on the outflow of your resource before you realize any profits.

Lets say you acquire a piece of land that is 40 meters by 50 meters and it is very bushy. It needs to be cleared. The workers would demand K800 ($50) to clear a 40m x 10m using your own tools, and eating your food. Now if they were to clear the whole 40m x 50m the price for labour would even reach K4000 ($250). Well if the price seems to be okay with you then how long will it take? The period for the workers to clear the land would not be clear. Because on the first day of clearing, they would start asking for some money to leave home for their families, they would start recommending new tools and promising that the following day they would start here and finish there. As soon as something is given to them, they are likely to even miss the following day. When they have used up all the money, they would come for work. This kind of work culture would not work well for a local investor on a shoe string budget.

The approach which was preferred was to agree on monthly basis. K250 to K300 ($15 – $18) per month. Well, well, well, that is what was affordable by the investor. In this case the investor did provide lunch for the workers and it was also agreed that the monthly salary would be increasing once the piece of land start generating income. Most did agree to the idea but would not reach the month end. Some worked two days whilst others 5 to 10 days before they begun to show signs of lack of seriousness. Thus calculations where made and workers reimbursed.

The monthly basis approach was preferred above piece work because it was a form of team building, forging long term relationships and possibilities for hiring more workers. That would only work if there is a core or foundational workers at the center of the the company. The other advantage is the there would a great amount of skills transfer to the locals. Learning do some work better and more efficiently through sharing of ideas.

On the other end, this kind of piece work contract works well for the investor in short term projects. The piece workers are generally called general workers. But it usually doesn’t work well for the piece worker in the long term period. Once the work is done, the piece worker is discarded. He, the piece worker is then forced to start looking for more piece works around. By spending more time looking for works around, that is less time spent on perfecting his skills. Most of these piece workers are mostly good at manual labour. The irony is that there is an ever supply of low skilled workers visa vie the demand. Besides, these workers are ill equipped as most of the money they realize in these works is used to tend to pleasure and family needs. They have little time to improve on their skills or acquiring of tools.

Against this background, these workers tend to be less ambitious without financial and general literacy. They seem to be content living in poorly built housing structures that are badly aligned one against the other or neighbour. Without running water or even electricity to some extent. Poor sanitary conditions in terms on toilets and bathrooms. Such disorganized villages seems to be the typical standard of African cities and compounds. There are no proper demarcation of one’s land next to another. Thus making difficult for service distribution such as water, road network and electricity. Living in such conditions exacerbates poor working culture.

So, what can be done to improve the situation? Well, the situation provided here is not the silver bullet. On September 1st 2018, the Zambian government introduced the minimum wage. On the surface the minimum wage do seem to cater for the the plight of the Zambian workers. But if truly enforced, most people would be out of work. Minimum wage can just be used as a guide to employers. The notion of two concerting adults agreeing on how much one would get paid for a certain amount of task do seem to work well for those entering into the contract. Otherwise if the minimum wage was to be enforce, it would be difficult for most shoe string budget entrepreneurs to accomplish task that may seem small at the begin be great enterprise in the long run.

It would also be helpful if investors adopted monthly wages rather than piece work or daily pay. This will inculcate a cultural change from small amount of money spent there and then to something significant to consider saving. It is unfortunate to learn that this general worker contract is even being used by government run parastatals. Whereby workers are paid K75 ($4.5) per day. The minds of these workers are then set on such a price and when they encounter an entrepreneur offering less per month they discard the opportunity. Even when their contract had expired with the parastatal.

Searching finding for a good and reliable worker with good characteristics such as humility and hard working is crown jewel for the entrepreneur. Once found, keep him very well.