State is undermining suffering workers

The doctors opted to strike over poor remunerations, which compromise their work ethics. The doctors’ plight is understandable. Doctors in public facilities earn on average, about $300 per month. This abuse is unheard of anywhere in the world.
In Kenya, the recent doctors’ industrial action ended with a decent settlement where interns earn $1,900 and the highest consultants earn about $5,600 a month. The State’s insensitivity to income inequality and widespread rent seeking signifies deliberate undermining of labour unions.
The doctors are seeking for equitable pay and improved work conditions. Public resources should not only fund political expedience.
The decaying public institutions need fixing too. Too much politicking has deteriorated critical social services. Ugandans are dying too often from conditions caused by social inequities.
Industrial actions are commonplace these days and perceived to target the State actors, rather than the private sector employers (corporations and businesses). This is largely because the Ugandan liberal market is under-developed, and atypical.
The market-labour relations are equally atypical due to patrimonial indulgences by the State and sub-state actors, who constantly distort the markets.
Researchers David Booth and Frederick Golooba-Mutebi studied the formation and influences of developmental patrimonialism in Rwanda, where State’s legitimate interests in the market, helps to shape the direction of the economy, reduces devastating rent-seeking tendencies, and spur real economic growth as measured by reduction in poverty rates . How does patrimonialism shape Uganda’s liberal market?
Interestingly, the Uganda’s market economy is not the main employer of the fledgling youthful labour force. Therefore, externalities (concentrated political interests), rather than the market, regulates and moderate labour- capital relations.
According to the 2016/17 Uganda National Household Survey, the general unemployment rate was high, 9.5 per cent, to signify that the economy was probably liberalising fast without expanding, or diversifying in proportions to the growing labour force; and, about 60 per cent of Ugandans are employed informally.
The high-end investors in manufacturing, agro-processing, information technology, banking, energy, tourism, infrastructure development, and mining avoid chaotic Uganda.
The local investors have come and run out of business due to political patronage, pervasive rent-seeking, restricted liberal rights and freedoms, making Ugandan market highly risk-prone. The political instability signals high potential for large-scale disruptions of the market, risks that investors avoid.
Today, the major institution of the economy is not the market – rather it is the State – the Presidency and the political class, who live off rent seeking. In this sense, the Ugandan economy is atypical in the real sense of a liberal economy as those shaped under ideologies of neo-liberalism.
Incidentally, the State tends to distances itself from social spending, especially in critical areas of childhood development, education, health, agriculture, and social securities. For instance, the budgetary allocation to social sector has declined from 37 per cent in 2002/2003 to 19 per cent in the 2017 budget. This expenditure if far below the global and emerging marketing standards where health social coverage remains as low as below 3.0 per cent.
The striking civil servants fall in the social sectors where the state has reneged on its fiscal obligations. The state wishes to cede social service obligations to the private sector or liberal market.
Evidence shows that working and living conditions are far better in economies with high labour union densities. Where unions thrive, pay inequities and poverty are reduced, and the sense of social justice supersedes that of economic justice. However, where the market is the dominant force, liberal rights are enforced but labour unions are suppressed. The objective of the capitalist class is maximization of profits by paying low wages and limiting benefits.
The 2014 Uganda Labour market profile identifies 40 workers unions, covering only 440,000 workers, or 3 per cent of the labour force, constituting 13 per cent of workers in the formal workforce.
Therefore, the state deliberately undermines labour and their unions, and every social and political organising.