Labour Consultant, Austin Gamey, has urged government to invite labour to a tripartite meeting to discuss the International Monetary Fund programme and its impact on labour and the economy.

According to him, that is currently the only solution to ensuring that there is an amicable agreement to burden-share as the country introduces austerity measures to help consolidate its fiscal policy under the IMF programme.

His comment follows the government agreeing to limit public sector wage increments and increase productivity under the IMF programme.

Asutin Gamey noted that should the government fail to appropriately discuss the outstanding issue with labour it could culminate into more friction with the unions throughout the IMF programme duration thus negatively affecting the success of the programme.

Speaking on PM Express, he said, “I think it is important that government quickly acknowledges the need to have a roundtable conversation, I’m not talking about debate and argument and endless partisan thing we have imported on ourselves.

“What we need to do is to have a simple conversation having in mind that we are all stakeholders in this thing. We don’t need this time the kind of powerful people in power, that’s not what we need, we all have to be sober, be candid with each other and share the burden properly, like was done in 2015.”

He urged the president to chair these discussions to show some commitment to the welfare of labour.

“According to our labour law, it is proper for government to call at least labour properly to a tripartite meeting, perhaps to be chaired by the president himself or vice-president on this occasion so we discuss thoroughly issues relating to the economy and the importance of the economy as far as labour is concerned.

“If that is done, I can assure you then the burden sharing becomes a real burden sharing because the words that are being used, ‘limiting’, calibration’ they’re all a bit vague and loose in many ways. And any form of anachronistic thing must be put to the back burner, we need to move everything to the front burner and all of us have a clean conversation and stop playing games with power now, we don’t need power situations,” he advised.