Botswana-based supermarket offers Kenyan employee salary increase

Employees of multinational retail chain Choppies are a happy and wealthy lot.

Botswana-based Choppies supermarket are set to get a six per cent salary increase following the signing of a new wage agreement that has been backdated to September 2017.

The new salary will stay in force for a year, after which employees can expect a further eight per cent boost to their salaries.

The agreement signed between Choppies and the Kenya Union of Commercial, Food and Allied Workers (KUCFAW) will now see new employees earn a minimum wage of Sh18,943.98 and a maximum Sh30,919.14, exclusive of housing allowances.

Apart from the new wages Choppers employees will also be entitled to new benefits, such as a commuter allowance of Sh2,000.

“Every unionisable employee who is not provided with free accommodation by the company shall be entitled to a housing allowance of two thousand eight hundred shillings (Sh2,800) or 15 per cent of the basic salary whichever is high,” the agreement further says.

Boniface Kavuvi, secretary general of the Union told a local daily that some Pre-existing benefits such as housing allowance and overtime pay have been increased and regularised in the agreement.

The working week will be 45 hours long beyond which employees will be entitled to overtime at a rate of 1.5 times the normal hourly rate.

Botswana’s first indigenous chain retail group Choppies, entered the Kenyan market in 2015 through a conditional agreement with Ukwala Supermarkets to purchase its ten outlets.

In December2016 , the Botswana-based Choppies entered fresh wage talks with its employees in Kenya

it currently has over 190 stores throughout the African continent from Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania to Kenya and Zambia.