Organisations in Uganda and those who work there, have for a considerable time now suffered from enormous stress. The long-term causes appear to be a complex mixture of external and internal factors. The former is exemplified by the international debt crisis and the latter by lack of accountability and the frustrated aspirations of the workers who populate the organisations. Workers within the appropriate age bracket trace the substantive date of the 'unprecedented' organisational stress to the first year of Obote II regime (1981). More exact observers pinpoint to the first phase of the Stabilisation and Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) initiated in 1980 when the annual wage declined by 26% to rank as the worst decline in ILO countries (Mamdani, 1989).
The familiar scenario in African countries such as Nigeria, Uganda or Zambia, that have introduced SAPs is the failure of organisation to look after their employees; salaries are less than a living wage and other basic necessities such as adequate health allowance are not covered. There is a break in the psychological contract between employer and employee accompanied by frustrated aspirations, diminished organisational commitment and institutionalised and non- institutionalised corruption at all levels. Office resources are frequently privatized and marketed elsewhere. Clientele may privately request to be served quickly for a fee or the public servant withholds the service unless a private fee is paid.
Structural adjustment in Uganda and elsewhere means the supremacy of the market over state intervention (Standing, 1991). It operates through a number of disciplinary tools including devaluation of the exchange rate, reduction of tariffs, elimination of subsidies and controlling wage adjustments to achieve and ensure one or more of the following processes (Geller, 1991; Bibanganbah, 1992):
a) productive reconversion where resources are reallocated either from non-tradeable to tradeable sub-sectors/sectors or from less efficient to more efficient enterprise;
b) privatisation of public enterprises where the accumulation process is increasingly allocated to the market from the State;
c) making labour more market flexible such as by restricting collective action including bargaining and association;
d) productive modernisation referring to making plants more technologically productive (Geller, 1991);
e) decentralization of political and economic powers to the districts in order to ensure accountability, effectiveness, and incentive management in service delivery (Bibangabah, 1992).
There seems to be a consensus among the enthusiasts of SAPs (see Mutebile, 1990 for instance) as well as the sceptics (Mamdani, 1989) that such tools have been used in Africa as a last resort because all else have failed and not necessarily because they will work. Despite the default nature of the programme or in spite of it, the implementers seem to have made little determined effort to tailor the programmes to Uganda's peculiar characteristics. One such characteristic is the labour market whose response to the restructuring exercise is also the focus of this study.
The influence of SAPs on people and on organisations within which labour is exchanged is both direct and indirect. An example of the direct effect on organisations is the reallocation of resources from one sector to another (Mutebilie, 1990). The reallocation concisely exemplifies the 'inhouse' conception of SAP as 'shock treatment' - today you are in position to import raw materials for your manufacturing concern, tomorrow that facility is withdrawn. This will directly affect workers who would experience a cut in the pay packet or who may have to be laid off. The general strategy here is demand management to whose outcome Ugandans have responded by becoming traders and distributors either of services, goods, or both (Jamal, 1988). The effect of this response is at its most telling and counter productive,in terms of its overall effect on the economy when "bureau workers" withhold a service until a fee has been exchanged or a promise to pay later has been extracted.
Our concern here is with the effect of the formal demand strategy through devaluation and productive reconversion. A key assumption of the study is that widespread organisational failure can come in the wake of SAPs, and that if it persists, the failure will work counter to the objectives of SAPs (Anjad and Edgreen, 1991).
The concern expressed above is shared by several others. After a decade of application of orthodox macroeconomic policy in Africa, the World Bank introduced a capacity-building initiative in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (World Bank, 1990). The Bank's initiative was in the wake of harsh realities which included widespread poverty, more inequality, more labour related insecurity,and chronic high unemployment (Standing, 1991; Robinson, 1991). The pattern in Uganda after 1980 has, in addition, been one of low productivity, high absenteeism, unrealistically low wages and widespread moonlighting (Civil Service Review Commission, 1989).
Several facts and conjectures are now emerging regarding SAPs in SSA.
1) SAPs, as currently applied, are overwhelmingly technical and marginally institutional so that the programmes are totally insensitive to local contexts (Standing, 1991).
2) The characteristics of economies in SSA are such that SAPs take longer to mature, if at all, so that measures that would be considered counter to the macroeconomic policy need to be taken before equilibria are restored. These measures are required to protect income (see for instance Robinson, 1991) as well as other negative impacts (Standing, 1991).
3) Most of the economic problems of SSA are essentially structural in origin and in persistence so that structural adjustment policies can only achieve very little in the long term while creating severe inflationary effects in the short term (Standing, 1991).
4) Macroeconomic management of economic growth and stabilisation cannot be understood without a proportional understanding of the behaviour of enterprises, workers, and consumers. It is these actors' ability to respond to changes that influence the effectiveness of the economy in making use of projected opportunities (Anjad and Edgreen, 1991). The study proceeds by outlining the problem and the model suggested to examine it. It then describes the characteristics of the labour market in SSA. The methodology, analysis and discussion of the data, conclusions and recommended policy follow in this order.
