Collective Bargaining Agreement Medical and Allied Industry

The Minister of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare has approved publication of a registered collective bargaining agreement between the Medical and Allied Employers' Association of Zimbabwe and two unions — the Medical Professional and Allied Workers' Union of Zimbabwe and the Medical and Allied Trades Workers Union of Zimbabwe. It is expressly made to repeal S.I. 93 of 2019.

Coverage is broad. It binds all employers in the private medical and allied sectors and all their non-managerial employees. The listed scope takes in private hospitals, clinics and maternity homes; retail pharmacies, wholesalers, manufacturers and distributors; private laboratories and radiology; private emergency medical services; specialists' and doctors' rooms across essentially every clinical discipline; dentistry, optometry, physiotherapy and rehabilitation centres; counsellors and psychologists; and medical health funders and medical aid societies. No employer or employee may waive a provision without Council approval, and where the agreement conflicts with the Labour Act, the Act prevails.

The agreement runs to 29 sections covering council dues and union subscriptions, retrenchment, grading and wages, hours of work, overtime, deductions, contracts and notices, locum and outside work, subsistence and travel allowances, leave, transfers and relocation, continuous service, job evaluation, gratuities, public holidays, and health, safety and wellness — plus a job grading and wages schedule and a code of conduct.

A caution on completeness: this is a very long instrument (roughly 118 000 characters) and the extract available here was cut off partway through the definitions section. That means the wage and grading schedule, the code of conduct, the council dues rates and the leave and allowance figures are not in the text that was read. Anyone who needs a rate, a grade or a disciplinary penalty must read those schedules in the instrument itself; the figures are not reproduced here because they were not available to be checked.

On timing, the agreement says it operates from the first day of the month following its registration. It does not print that date, and the gazette date of 15 November 2024 is not itself the commencement, so no effective date is recorded.