Kenya will see the world premiere of the online Minimum Wage Compliance initiative, launched by the world wide WageIndicator Foundation on April 9th 2014. Its Complaint Forms will be offered for use to workers and employers of the general public on Mywage.org/Kenya and Africapay.org/Kenya. Participants in this initiative are the Central Organisation of Trade Unions COTU and the Federation of Kenyan Employers FKE. The Minimum Wage Complaint Form has been fully endorsed by the Industrial Court of Kenya.
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 Kenyan 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, Minimum Wage and Labour Laws information seems difficult to get by. Since a few years however this has been made easily accessible on the WageIndicator websites Mywage and Africapay. And now there is the Complaint Form on these websites, with its focus on the two most pressing problems working people face. That is non-payment of Minimum Wage and working too long hours.
The procedure is simple: look up the Complaint Form online, fill it up and submit it. The technical staff of WageIndicator will create on daily basis an overview of all Complaint Forms to the project partners COTU and FKE. This will speed up the dispute
resolution tremendously. If needed cases go to the Industrial Court. Though the main purpose is to mediate on a faster scale, with much better overview of complaints by workers and employers.
Workers who fill up a Complaint Form online are much more sure of proper payment, then ever before. A solution takes a few days instead of a few 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 to locate hotspots of injustice.
The Kenyan initiative will be keenly observed in its pilot stage and success rates by neighboring countries such as Tanzania, Mozambique where a similar initiative is under preparation, as well as Ghana in West Africa.
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.
The 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 assisted by world-renowned universities, trade unions and employers’ organizations and currently operates in 80 countries. Its international staff consists of some 100 specialists worldwide.
The WageIndicator Foundation is a global organization reaching millions on a monthly basis.
In Kenya WageIndicator is co-coordinated by the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU) and Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE).
This story was published/broadcast here:
- NTV