MOZAMBIQUE
Ignoring Government Orders: G4S in Mozambique
30 January 2007 -- Pay Up, Ministry Tells Wackenhut Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique
The Labor Ministry issues a response to the G4S statement on labor disputes surrounding the company's Mozambican operations.
...National Labour Inspector Joaquim Siuta told "Mediafax" that he regarded the weekend release as "an attempt to manipulate public opinion", and there could be no going back on the Ministry's decision.
..."By law, the company must pay compensation to the 300 workers", said Siuta. "Since the rule of law is in force in Mozambique, the company must pay. If it doesn't, it would be violating the workers' rights".
...[Siuta] added that the G4S attitude "does not surprise us, because all over the world Group 4 does not respect either judicial decisions or the rights of its workers. This company only obeys the orders of its bosses in London".
29 January, 2007 -- Wackenhut Explains Itself Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique
...[I]n a lengthy release issued at the weekend, justifying its poor labour relations, Wackenhut actually admitted one of the major complaints raised by its employees - namely that between 1994 and 2005 it had not been paying overtime.
...Wackenhut...paints itself as an investor that has been wronged by the Ministry. But AIM [Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique] knows of no other major company in Mozambique that has refused to pay its workers overtime, or which has sacked hundreds of employees, changed its mind, and demanded that they all come back to work.
Furthermore, Wackenhut/G4S is a notoriously bad employer all over the world, and has become the subject of an international campaign to force it to clean up its act.
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15 December 2006 -- John Mortimer, Managing Director of G4S’s Mozambican operations, has had his work permit cancelled following his repeated refusal to honor Labour Ministry orders regarding his employees’ legal rights. G4S operates under the name Wackenhut in Mozambique.
In two separate cases, Wackenhut has flouted the Mozambican Labour Ministry’s orders that the company make legally required payments to his workers. Most recently, Mortimer publicly refused to pay an estimated US$300,000 in severance pay to 250 workers who had been working at the United States Embassy in Mozambique. Wackenhut maintains that the workers were not actually fired when the Embassy declined to renew its contract with Wackenhut. Journalists, however, reported that they had seen letters from Wackenhut unilaterally terminated work contracts with these officers.
Instead of meeting this legal obligation, John Mortimer, the Managing Director of Wackenhut in Mozambique, told the press that the workers had no claim on the company, and that the Labour Ministry had no authority to press the company to pay.
On 10 December 2006, Mozambique Labour Minister Helena Taipo cancelled Mortimer’s work permit and “definitively prohibit[ed] his activities” in Mozambique. Her dispatch stated that Mortimer had contributed to “instability in labour relations,” did not permit “a climate of peace and harmony” in the company, and had disobeyed direct instructions from the General Inspectorate of Labour. Taipo referred both to the case of the U.S. embassy workers and to a separate case in which Wackenhut has similarly refused to pay $1.36 million in back wages dating back to 1994 to 600 workers.
Taipo also stated that the Ministry will also begin legal proceedings against Wackenhut.
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5 September, 2006 -- G4S' subsidiary in Mozambique, which operates under the name Wackenhut, is refusing to follow an order by Mozambican Labour Minister Helena Taipo to pay back wages to its 2000 or so workers, according the Agencia di Informacao de Mocambique. The payments total about 34 million new meticais (about 1.36 million U.S. dollars) for unpaid overtime that Wackenhut employees claim they worked but were never paid for, from as far back as 1994. Taipo set a deadline of September 6 for the company to pay up.
This is the second Labour Ministry warning that Wackenhut has ignored. Last year, according to news reports, an arbitration panel found in the workers’ favor, ordering the company to pay the workers what they were owed.
The workers have stated that they will strike if they do not receive a satisfactory response by the deadline. This will be their second strike over the payments. The first ended in July 2005 when, according to media reports, workers stated that they were returning to work while a team looked into the disputed wages.
This conflict comes as G4S is trying to expand in Mozambique. The company reported this week that it had acquired fifty percent of Alfa Security Services. This dispute, in which G4S refuses to comply with a government order and to meet its obligations to its workers, is also strikingly similar to disputes the company has faced in 2006 in Cameroon, Indonesia, and Malawi.