About 100 women who complained that they were exposed to a harmful pesticide on the Mukono and Wakiso Royal Van Zanten (RVZ) flower farms are yet to be compensated.
According to Jennifer Nassali, the general secretary of the Uganda Horticultural Industrial Services Provider and Allied Workers Union (UHISPAWU), RVZ is reluctant to talk to the union, and workers still face exposure to the poisonous metam sodium. Speaking to The Observer on Tuesday, Nassali said the women were only reinstated to their dangerous jobs.
“The women have not been compensated,” she said.“We wrote to management to plan how they can be paid and to come up with measures on how to make the farms secure but they have been reluctant. They only wrote back saying they had undertaken all the necessary precautions and made the place safe.”
When contacted, RVZ managing director Feico Smith declined to comment on the compensation saga. He claimed that none of the affected women had been granted leave without pay.
“We are not the type of people to do these things. Thank you!” he said, before hanging up.
According to the Workers Compensation Act 2000, an employer is mandated to compensate an employee if he or she is injured during the course of her employment. It also states that the employee shall be compensated if the said injury incapacitated him/ her for three consecutive days.
Also, Section 13 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act 2006 makes it a duty of an employer to provide safe working conditions to his or her employers.
In October 2016, about 100 women florists working in RVZ greenhouses, in Mukono and Wakiso districts, were exposed to metam sodium which left them with several complications.
The company reportedly sprayed the two greenhouses with metam sodium on a Friday and then ordered 40 of the women to go into the rose gardens on Monday and pick flowers without protective gear. The order contravened the guidelines that say no one should access a greenhouse for five days after it is sprayed with chemicals.
After inhaling the pesticide, the women started feeling unconscious and later began vomiting profusely. Others complained of strong headaches, low vision and abdominal pains.
Even after the first batch got complications, another 40 were sent into the greenhouse and they too became exposed. A few days later, another 19 women working on RVZ’s farm in Mukono were also exposed to the dangerous chemical.
The women were rushed to the company’s clinic where they were, allegedly, given paracetamol tablets to relieve the pain. Later, UHISPAW officials moved 46 of the women to Kadic hospital after realising that the prescription offered at the farm clinic changed little of the women’s condition.
Nassali also noted that RVZ had not only failed to compensate the exposed women but that six of the Mukono women, after being reinstated to their jobs, had been granted unpaid leave. She said efforts to have the company pay them while they are on leave had failed.
But Nassali has vowed to fight on: “We are going to keep pushing for compensation because we want justice for these women.”
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