THERE are moments when a government announcement reveals not just a policy decision, but an attitude.
The Cabinet's approval last week of a new minimum wage for domestic workers was one of those moments. After what we were told was a careful review process involving the Wages and Salaries Advisory Council, the government set the minimum wage for a domestic worker in Zimbabwe at US$99 per month.
For a cook or housekeeper, the figure goes up to US$99. For someone who spends their days caring for a child, an elderly person, or a person with a disability, the wage has been set at US$108.
And for someone who does that same exhausting, emotionally demanding work but happens to hold a Red Cross certificate, the ceiling rises to US$117. The government presented these figures to the nation with the calm confidence of people who believe they have done something good. I am struggling to share that confidence.
Let us be honest about what US$99 a month actually means in Zimbabwe today.
It means roughly US$3 a day. It means that a woman who wakes up before sunrise, travels across town, spends eight or more hours cleaning someone else's house, cooking someone else's meals, washing someone else's clothes, and caring for someone else's children, returns home in the evening with the equivalent of US$3 to show for her day.
Out of that US$3, she must feed herself. She must pay for her transport. She must contribute to her rent.
If she has children of her own, and many of these workers do, she must find a way to feed them, clothe them, pay their school fees, and meet the thousand small expenses that come with raising a family.
Anyone who has done their grocery shopping recently, who has stood at a market stall or walked through a supermarket in any Zimbabwean city, knows that US$3 does not go far.
A litre of cooking oil alone can consume a significant portion of that. A bag of mealie-meal, the most basic staple of the Zimbabwean diet, takes another large chunk. And yet the government has looked at all of this, consulted a wages council, sat around a Cabinet table, and concluded that US$99 is the appropriate floor for human dignity in this country.
What metrics were used to arrive at this figure? That is a question that deserves a serious answer, not a bureaucratic response about the Labour Act and tripartite consultations.
When a government sets a minimum wage, it should be anchored in reality. It is supposed to reflect, at least in part, what it actually costs a person to live in this country with a basic level of dignity.
It is supposed to take into account the price of food, transport, shelter, healthcare and education. If those were genuinely the measures being applied, then US$99 could not possibly have been the outcome.
What the figure suggests instead is that the people making these decisions are calculating from a position of distance, from offices and committee rooms where the daily reality of a domestic worker's life is something they read about in reports rather than something they experience or witness up close.
That distance is dangerous because it allows people in power to sign off on figures like US$99 and genuinely believe they have been generous.
There is also a deeper injustice lurking beneath this announcement that we must name clearly.
Domestic workers in Zimbabwe are overwhelmingly women. They are often women from rural areas or from the most economically vulnerable communities in our cities and towns.
Many of them have limited formal education, not because they are not intelligent or capable, but because life did not give them the same opportunities it gave others. And because of all of this, they are also among the least able to organise, to strike, to march, to make their voices heard in the places where decisions are made.
They do not belong to powerful trade unions with the ability to negotiate aggressively on their behalf.
The very mechanism that is supposed to protect them, the government review process, is the same mechanism that has just handed them US$90 a month and asked them to be grateful. There is something deeply wrong with a system in which the people who have the least power are also the people who receive the least protection.
But the government is only one part of this problem. We must also speak plainly about the employers, the middle-class and upper-class Zimbabwean households that employ these workers everyday.
When the government sets a minimum wage of US$99, it does not simply set a floor. In practice, for many employers, it sets a ceiling too. It becomes the justification, the legal cover, for paying as little as possible.
How many employers in this country will now point to the Cabinet announcement and say, with a clear conscience, that they are paying their workers the government-approved rate, as though that settles the matter of whether they are being fair? How many will use this figure to resist any request from a worker for a raise, saying that the law does not require it? The government, by setting such a low minimum, is not just failing domestic workers directly. It is handing their employers a weapon and some of those employers will use it without hesitation.
We already know, from painful experience, that the relationship between domestic workers and their employers is one of the most vulnerable spaces for abuse in our society.
These workers are inside people's homes, away from public view, away from colleagues who might witness mistreatment, away from the kind of oversight that exists in formal workplaces. Stories of domestic workers being underpaid, overworked, verbally abused, denied days off and treated as less than full human beings are not rare in Zimbabwe.
They are common. They are shared quietly, among the workers themselves, in the language of people who have learned that complaining out loud comes with consequences.
A low minimum wage does not create this culture of abuse, but it feeds it. It sends a signal, from the highest levels of government, that this category of worker is not quite worth the same consideration as others. And that signal is received and acted upon by employers who were already looking for permission to pay less and demand more.
What Zimbabwe's domestic workers deserve is not charity. It is not sympathy. It is a wage that reflects the true value of the work they do.
Think, for a moment, about what a domestic worker actually provides to a household. She frees up the time of the family she works for, often allowing both parents to pursue careers and earn incomes that would be impossible if they had to manage all household duties themselves.
She cares for children during the hours when parents are at work, providing safety, warmth and continuity that is invaluable to a growing child's development. She maintains a home to a standard that the family returns to every evening with relief and comfort.
This is skilled, demanding and essential work. The fact that it happens inside a private home rather than inside an office building or a factory does not make it less valuable. It only makes it easier to undervalue and we have been doing exactly that for far too long.
The government should go back and look at this figure again, not next year, not after another round of tripartite consultations that take months and produce timid recommendations, but soon.
The review of minimum wages for domestic workers should be tied to a proper assessment of the cost of living, updated regularly and set at a level that gives these workers a genuine fighting chance of meeting their basic needs. Zimbabwe is not a country without compassion. We are, by nature and by culture, a people who understand what it means to look after one another. But compassion that does not translate to fair wages, decent conditions and real protection under the law is just sentiment.
Our domestic workers are not asking for sentiment. They are asking to be treated as workers, as citizens and as human beings whose labour has value. The least this government can do is agree.
