Wage Negotiations

As part of establishing good management practices in the brewery I introduced standard job grading procedures.

This fitted in very well with the Government of Botswana’s own program, but what I didn’t know was that the Government were determined not to allow private operations like ours to pay more than state enterprises, which they thought would result in good employees drifting away from government work. They also had a philosophy of keeping wages low as a way to encourage businesses to employ more people.

I would have an annual sit down with the Minister of Labour, who at the time was a large, charming, amusing man, who had incidentally worked as a rep for Rhodesian Breweries (which was also one of our subsidiaries), so we knew him well.

Usually in a situation like this, the management of the company would be trying to minimise wage rates while the Government strove to increase rates. It was quite the opposite in this case. With the Government wanting to increase the number of jobs for locals, they wanted to keep wage rates down; I wanted to make our rates competitive, so my inclination was to try to increase them. Every year over two days we would sit and argue whether such and such a job grade was at a higher or lower level than the equivalent Government job. This was difficult, most of the jobs in our operations had no real equivalent in Government. In the end we just had to agree something. This only applied to local employees, as expat salaries were entirely up to the discretion of the company.

In particular, our Deputy General Manager’s pay created a strange anomaly. It was important for many reasons, as well as simple justice, that the Deputy GM be remunerated somewhere in line with the senior expats, but I had to agree with the Minister that we couldn’t very well pay one of our people more than the President of Botswana.

As a result, we ended up building him a swimming pool, as a sort of fringe benefit. No sooner had we done this, however, I discovered that the man couldn’t swim a stroke. So, in the final analysis, our Deputy GM’s wage package included one brand new swimming pool and ongoing swimming lessons.