By Vimbai Eva Mushongera

Zimbabwe’s new Occupational Safety and Health Act, 2026, represents an important opportunity to strengthen workplace protection. But legislation alone will not make work safe. Its success will depend on whether workers can exercise their rights without fear, whether enforcement institutions are adequately resourced, and whether economic policies create decent jobs rather than leave people dependent on dangerous, insecure and poorly protected work.

The Act, published on 16 October 2026, replaces the Factories and Works Act and the Pneumoconiosis Act with a consolidated framework for occupational safety, health and occupational disease. Its recognition of workers’ right to refuse work presenting imminent danger is significant. However, the real test is not simply what the law says, but whether workers across Zimbabwe’s formal and informal economies can use it in practice.

The urgency is clear. The Herald reported that workplace injuries rose from 4,242 in 2024 to 4,414 in 2025, while recorded workplace fatalities increased from 70 to 78. By June 2026, reported fatalities had reached 52, compared with 40 during the corresponding period in 2025. These figures point to a continuing prevention and enforcement challenge, even as legal reforms advance.

Safety is also a question of gender and power

Occupational safety and health must be understood more broadly than machinery, mines, factories, protective clothing and accident prevention. It must include the gendered conditions under which people work, the power employers exercise over employees, and the risks faced by women and other workers in insecure employment.

Sexual harassment is a workplace safety and human rights issue. It can affect workers’ psychological well-being, dignity, job security and ability to earn a living. It can also undermine women’s participation and advancement in the labour market.

Zimbabwe has evidence of the scale of this problem. An International Labour Organization (ILO) rapid situational analysis conducted in 2017 found that sexual harassment, verbal abuse, emotional abuse and economic abuse were among the prominent forms of workplace violence and harassment. The study also found that cases went unreported because of fear of losing employment and unequal power relations, with women particularly affected. Separately, a 2018 survey by Industrial Psychology Consultants, cited by the ILO in 2023, found that 14 per cent of those surveyed reported having experienced sexual harassment in their workplaces.

These findings expose an important weakness in how workplace safety is sometimes understood. A worker may be physically present at work and yet be unsafe because a supervisor, manager, contractor or customer can exploit economic dependence or authority. For a woman on a temporary contract, a domestic worker, a farmworker, a vendor or a worker whose livelihood depends on daily earnings, reporting harassment may appear to threaten the income on which an entire household depends.

Some complaints may never be lodged; others may be abandoned or withdrawn under pressure. That possibility should not be confused with evidence of a verified national withdrawal rate. Rather, it highlights why reporting systems must be confidential, accessible, independent and protective against retaliation. An employer-controlled procedure that leaves a complainant exposed to the person accused, workplace gossip, victimisation or loss of income cannot provide meaningful protection.

The new OSH framework should therefore be implemented alongside effective workplace policies on sexual harassment and gender-based violence, accessible complaint mechanisms, protection for complainants and witnesses, fair investigations, and appropriate remedies. Trade unions and employers should train workplace representatives to identify and respond to harassment. Women must also be represented in safety committees and decision-making structures, not merely consulted after policies have been designed.

This protection must extend beyond conventional workplaces. Women in the informal economy may face harassment from officials, customers, service providers and other people encountered while earning a living. When their work is treated as illegitimate or outside ordinary labour protection, seeking redress can become especially difficult. The ILO’s analysis of women in Zimbabwe’s informal economy has documented these barriers.

The problem is bigger than the workplace

The structural roots of unsafe work require us to look beyond the individual employer and the immediate worksite. They lie partly in how the economy generates jobs, distributes income, regulates production and provides social protection.

In Economics for Everyone, economist Jim Stanford offers an accessible critique of the idea that market outcomes should simply be accepted as natural or inevitable. His approach encourages workers to examine how economic power, ownership, wages and public policy shape working life. Applied to occupational safety, this raises a difficult question: how freely can a worker refuse dangerous work when refusing it may mean losing the only available source of income?

A legal right to refuse imminent danger is essential, but its practical value is weakened where workers have no savings, no unemployment protection, limited access to social security, and few alternative jobs. Economic insecurity can turn consent into a survival strategy. Workers may remain in hazardous conditions not because they consider them safe, but because the cost of walking away is unaffordable.

This is particularly relevant in Zimbabwe, where formal employment has contracted, and large numbers of people earn their livelihoods in informal, irregular or insecure work. In Beyond the Enclave: Towards a Pro-Poor and Inclusive Development Strategy for Zimbabwe, Godfrey Kanyenze and his co-authors examine the country’s persistent economic dualism, the entrenchment of informality and the need for inclusive development and decent employment.

Their analysis is relevant to the limits of a safety framework that depends too heavily on the conventional employer–employee relationship. If protection is strongest where employment is formal and weakest where people work in small enterprises, domestic service, informal trading, agriculture or artisanal mining, those most exposed to economic vulnerability may also be those least able to claim protection.

The challenge is not to abandon labour standards because work is informal. It is to develop practical ways to extend prevention, representation, inspection, occupational health services and social protection to workers wherever they earn a living. Formalisation must mean more than registering a business or collecting revenue. It should improve working conditions, income security, access to social insurance and workers’ ability to organise.

Joseph Stiglitz’s work on employment, social justice and societal well-being makes a related point: development cannot be judged solely by capital accumulation or market efficiency while distribution, employment and workers’ interests are treated as secondary. Economic growth that fails to produce secure livelihoods and wider social well-being misses a central purpose of development.

Zimbabwe’s industrial and investment policies should therefore be assessed not only by output, exports or the value of investment attracted, but also by the quality and safety of the jobs created. Mining, agriculture, construction, manufacturing and emerging industries must be governed by enforceable labour standards, effective occupational health systems and meaningful worker participation.

Social protection is part of workplace prevention

The debate also connects with Zimbabwe’s wider social protection and social contract challenges. In the tradition of public debate associated with Ibbo Mandaza and other Zimbabwean scholars, questions of state responsibility, citizenship and the social contract invite us to ask what economic and political institutions owe working people. Social protection should be understood not as charity for those who have fallen into hardship, but as part of the institutional foundation of a society in which people can live and work with dignity.

Zimbabwe’s social protection system faces significant coverage and implementation challenges. A 2024 review by Tomy Ncube and Una Murray of government-led social assistance under the National Social Protection Policy Framework found problems including inadequate funding, delayed transfers, benefits that lose value against inflation, weak monitoring and evaluation, and gaps in grievance and redress mechanisms. Informal workers are among those who face serious exclusions from existing arrangements.

These weaknesses matter directly to occupational safety. When a worker has no reliable income support during illness, no effective protection after injury, inadequate compensation for occupational disease, or no viable alternative to hazardous employment, the pressure to continue working can override the instinct to protect one’s health.

A worker-centred safety system must therefore connect prevention to social insurance, compensation, access to treatment, rehabilitation and income security. It should also consider the position of injured workers, people living with occupational diseases, older workers, workers with disabilities and families who lose their main income earner through a workplace fatality.

Debt, development choices and the pressure to accept risk

Zimbabwe’s debt burden and constrained fiscal space also form part of this wider discussion. Patrick Bond’s political-economy work on Zimbabwe’s economic crisis and development choices examines how external economic relationships, debt and policy decisions shape the options available to the country. His work provides a useful lens through which to interrogate the distribution of economic costs and benefits.

The relationship between debt and workplace risk should not be reduced to a claim that debt automatically causes accidents. The connection is more structural. Debt servicing and limited fiscal resources can intensify difficult choices over public spending, including the resources available for labour inspection, occupational health services, social protection and industrial development. At the same time, households under economic pressure may be compelled to accept dangerous work, insecure contracts or migration in search of income.

The International Organization for Migration’s National Labour Migration Policy for Zimbabwe identifies challenges facing migrant workers, including gaps in social protection, irregular migration, exploitative wages, long working hours, the absence of employment contracts and limited union representation. These conditions show why labour migration must be part of the occupational safety conversation.

Migrant workers should not have to exchange their safety and labour rights for the prospect of supporting their families. Bilateral labour arrangements, recruitment systems and regional cooperation should provide accessible information, enforceable employment conditions, avenues for complaints, union support and continuity of social protection across borders.

The wider policy question is whether Zimbabwe’s development strategy creates productive, safe and adequately protected employment at home, or leaves too many people dependent on hazardous livelihoods and migration into jobs where protection is weak. Debt resolution, investment, industrialisation, employment policy and social protection should be treated as interconnected questions, with workers participating meaningfully in decisions that affect their lives.

A law is only as strong as its enforcement

The new Act must be supported by an effective occupational safety and health system. That requires adequately staffed and financed labour inspection services, transport and equipment for inspections, access to occupational health specialists, reliable injury and disease data, and timely follow-up where violations are found.

Workplace safety committees and elected worker representatives should have a meaningful role in identifying hazards, reviewing incidents and monitoring corrective measures. Joint workplace inspections can help build a prevention culture, but they must be properly resourced and must not replace the independent enforcement responsibilities of state inspectors.

Workers and their unions also need access to credible technical expertise. Where chemical exposure, dust, toxic substances or occupational disease is suspected, workers may lack the laboratories, occupational physicians, industrial hygienists and toxicologists needed to establish the risk and document harm. Employers or larger investors may have greater access to technical evidence, creating an imbalance in the ability to challenge unsafe practices.

An effective system should establish transparent procedures for risk assessment, access to relevant workplace information, independent testing where necessary, medical surveillance and fair investigation of occupational disease. Workers should not have to prove complex scientific claims without access to the expertise needed to make their case.

Climate change makes these capabilities increasingly important. Heat stress, smoke, dust, changing patterns of infectious and vector-borne disease, and other environmental hazards require prevention strategies informed by occupational health expertise. The particular risks differ across sectors and occupations, so assessments must be evidence-based rather than assume that every worker faces the same exposures.

Collective bargaining also has a vital role. Unions and employers can negotiate sector-specific provisions on heat exposure, protective equipment, chemical handling, medical surveillance, incident reporting, harassment prevention and joint safety inspections. These agreements can go beyond the legal minimum, but they cannot substitute for public enforcement or allow basic rights to depend entirely on the strength of an individual union.

From legislation to a worker-centred safety compact

Zimbabwe should use the new law as the starting point for a broader implementation compact involving government, employers, trade unions, occupational health professionals and organisations representing informal and migrant workers.

That compact should establish clear implementation responsibilities, adequate and transparent financing, measurable enforcement targets, regular publication of injury and fatality data, stronger reporting and redress mechanisms, and an inclusive approach to occupational disease and workplace harassment. It should also ensure that women, young workers, workers with disabilities and informal-economy representatives participate meaningfully in the design and monitoring of workplace safety measures.

The government should also advance the relevant international standards, including the ILO’s Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 1981 (No. 155), and consider the implications of the Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 2006 (No. 187), and the Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190). Ratification, where pursued, must be accompanied by practical implementation and effective remedies.

Ultimately, the measure of success will not be the number of laws enacted or safety committees established. It will be whether fewer workers are injured or killed, whether occupational diseases are prevented and recognised, whether women can report harassment without fear, and whether workers can refuse unsafe work without being forced into destitution.

A safe workplace is not a luxury to be secured after economic growth has occurred. It is a condition of decent work, productive development and social justice. Zimbabwe’s new law will fulfil its promise only when workers have both the legal right to safety and the economic, institutional and collective power to exercise it.