NKANA Member of Parliament Binwell Mpundu has demanded that government should consider compelling mining companies in the country to be paying miners at least US$500 as minimum monthly take home wages.
He accused giant mining companies in the country of mistreating their workers by paying them slave wages despite making super profits.
Mr Mpundu said this yesterday during the Vice President question time in parliament.
He said the disparity between local miners and the so called expatriates is too wide and should be corrected.
Mr Mpundu accused mining companies of paying exorbitant wages to expatriates at the expense of Zambians who are doing the actual job of extracting minerals.
“The take home pay for just 60 expatriates that the mining companies are paying is enough pay over 7,000 local miners, which makes me sad as Member of Parliament from a mining constituency,” he said.
He said over the years, miners have been treated as cheap laborers and that there should be an attempt by the new administration to change the minimum wage to favor miners.
Mr Mpundu said government should consider adjusting the minimum wage for miners because the wages mining companies are currently paying as take home is too little considering the work that they do to keep the country’s economy afloat.
Meanwhile, government has urged union leaders in the mining sector to be on top of things and demand what is rightly due to their members.
Vice president Mutale Nalumango said unions should engage mining companies because government can only come in if they fail to agree.
She said it is the duty of labor unions in the mining sector to negotiate for their members adding that unions should also monitor the profitability of the industry to ensure they negotiate for the best for their members.
“The duty of the labour unions is to negotiate for their members and not to `eat’ themselves but look at how the industry is performing and demand increments based on that,” she said.
Ms Nalumango said the government minimum wage only applies to vulnerable sectors and even if it revised the minimum wage, it will be difficult to capture the interest of workers in the mining sector.
She said according to her understanding there are different categories of minimum wages that government has put in place but that does not cater for the miners.
Ms Nalumango said government does not set minimum wage for miners because the mining sector is very different from other sectors of the economy.
She said if the Mining sector is performing well, let the workers also benefit, and if the sector is performing badly, “we all know what would happen,” said Ms Nalumango.
