Zimbabwe hospitality group African Sun has made a decision to cut employee salaries by 50%.
Cognisant of the rule of law that an employment contract cannot be unilaterally altered, this serves to inform you as follows;
i) The company lost business long before the Ministerial Public Health (COVID-19 Presidential Containment and Treatment) (National Lockdown) Order, 2020 – SI 83 of 2020, and has not been generating revenue since then. This difficult season is expected to sustain for a while.
ii) As a result of the effects of the Lockdown Order and the Covid-19 pandemic as a whole, you are unable to avail yourself for work and the company has no work to avail to you owing to circumstances beyond its control, which circumstances can be legally coined ‘force majeure’.
iii) In an effort to save your job and to ensure that you have at least an income whilst at the same time mitigating the company’s risk of going out of business, the Board has ascertained and resolved that it is only possible to pay employees 50% salary for the months of April and May 2020. In the following months, the salary will accrue at 50% and will stand to be paid when the company recovers from the current trading and financial affliction.iv) The balance and accrued salaries will be paid as and when the current ‘act of God’ has been contained and business has normalised.v) The other option, should you not agree to the proposed 50% salary cut and the other measures set out herein above, is the mutual temporary suspension of contractual obligations on account of impossibility of same on the basis of ‘force majeure’ in the form of Covid-19 pandemic and the aforesaid Ministerial Order.vi) If you are not part of the critical staff working from home, and have not filled a vacation leave form, you are deemed to be on paid vacation leave with effect from 30 March 2020 to 19 April 2020. The payment of same will be in terms of the measures set out under Paragraph (1) (iii) hereof. Please note this period may be extended.vii) In the event that you had applied for vacation leave, and your leave has coincided with the Lockdown period, you shall remain on vacation leave during that period.viii) Save for instances where it has been deemed or satisfactorily justified, fuel will only be availed on a need basis for the next 5 months reckoned from 1 April 2020. It being understood that, like your salary, this too is a cost that will need to be rationalised according to the activity and austerity measures in place. In the circumstances set out above, you are required to respond via email within 24 hours indicating that you have understood the measures and consent to the same. Failure to respond shall be deemed to be consent to same.