I know my position on this issue will be so unpopular that I do not expect any support whatsoever. But I will say it any way.

It is wrong for government to try to force companies to stop "casualisation" of labour. Let them use casual workers for as long as they want; do not force them to stop. You are only going to create bigger problems than the one you are trying to address.

What will happen when these companies are forced to make their casual workers permanent? Government (and the Post) thinks that these companies will just change the status of all these workers from 'casual' to 'permanent'. No. These companies will actually have to get rid of most of these workers and retain only a few of them. Why? Because the cost of labour inevitably goes high when you make the labourers permanent.

Why? Because of the very reasons that the Post and the government wants these jobs to be permanent: better pay, more perks, job security, etc. But you will help only a few of them; the rest will be much worse off because not only will they have no job security, they will have no job! Government should decide whether at this stage what they would like to see is more job security or more jobs. You can't have them both in the current state of the economy. Perhaps we have forgotten something very important: we are not a rich, first world country; we are a very poor fourth world nation. So, you cannot talk the language of the rich. What our poor people need at this stage are some jobs, not job security, not pension schemes, not leave days, not special allowances, and so on. They just need a job, casual or not.

By discouraging or forbidding casualisation, you are going to create a situation where so many people will be thrown out onto the streets, and when they try to just get a temporary job somewhere else in order to feed themselves for a few days, they will find that all the companies will refuse to give them these jobs even though they can do with their help, simply because they cannot afford to hire them as permanents. The people you are trying to help now will then turn against you, and you will think that life is just unfair!

Socialists always have good intentions of helping the poor people, but I don't know why they can't see that their attempt to directly help poor people through government interventions always backfires. That truly is the history of socialism everywhere in the world.

It's the same thing with minimum wage laws. You think you are helping the poor by forbidding everyone from ever paying below a certain amount of money. So-called 'civil society' has been fighting for the minimum wage laws to be extended to everyone, including domestic servants, thinking they are helping domestic servants. I know many people who have employed more than one young house servant because these young people could accept K200,000 each. They are hired to do jobs which one could do on their own but they figure it is so cheap to just hire someone to do it. But if the minimum wage law is enforced, it will be like Europe: middle class people will now start doing their own laundry, washing their own dishes, etc, because it will be too expensive to just hire someone to do that for you, especially more than one. This means many of these people will shift from getting K200,000 to getting zero kwacha. I know K200,000 is bad, but I'm not sure I can understand how zero kwacha is a big improvement on it. Ironically, before the living wage was enforced, these people were at least living.

Casualisation Of Labour Part 2