Dar es Salaam – Laeticia Mukurasi, the gender and development practitioner whose account of fighting a job loss became the book Post Abolished, says changes in labour law have given workers protections that were unavailable when she was removed from her post in the 1980s.
But in a recent conversation with The Chanzo’s journalist Holyness Mbise, published on October 9, Mukurasi said written rights alone do not settle the unequal power that can shape a workplace, particularly when employees do not know the law, cannot afford representation or face delays in pursuing a complaint.
Her account links a personal employment dispute at the former Fibreboards Africa Limited in Arusha to a wider question that remains current: what happens after a worker decides that a dismissal, demotion, harassment or other workplace decision is unfair.
Laeticia later held gender and development roles with the United Nations Development Programme and UNIFEM, and the African Development Bank described her as its Gender Specialist in 2008.
Sacked
During the interview, she recalled being summoned to management while she was working as a personnel and administration manager and handed a letter saying her post had been abolished as part of cost-cutting measures.
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Laeticia says she had worked for about a decade, had favourable performance records and was then teaching workers about their rights and obligations when the notice arrived.
She said she immediately began keeping copies of documents in her employment file, wrote to contest the decision and sought the support of her trade-union branch. The workers backed her case, she said, partly because they regarded her as having involved them in personnel decisions and explained labour rules to them.
Laeticia says the labour process eventually restored her to work, but not on a finding that gender discrimination had been legally established.
Rather, she said the employer had failed to follow the required redundancy procedure, including consultation and selection rules, while her allegations of gendered treatment could not be resolved under the legal framework then available.
Her account also included a separate dispute over company housing after she separated from her husband. She said a court upheld her right to remain in accommodation allocated through her job, but that the conflict deepened the personal and institutional pressures she faced.
Legal framework
Tanzania’s Employment and Labour Relations Act prohibits direct and indirect discrimination in employment on grounds including sex, gender, pregnancy, marital status and family responsibility, and treats harassment as a form of discrimination.
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The same law says termination is unfair unless an employer proves a valid and fair reason and a fair procedure, and specifically excludes pregnancy, trade-union activity and discrimination from fair reasons for dismissal.
The Labour Laws (Amendments) Act, 2025 also introduced compensation of between 12 and 24 months’ remuneration where termination is unfair because of discrimination or harassment.
Laeticia did not suggest that legislation has removed the problem. She said workers can still be denied promotion, demoted or subjected to sexual harassment, while economic pressure and scarce jobs may make it harder to report abuse or challenge management decisions.
“How can you fight for something you do not know?” she asked, arguing that employees should be taught their rights, duties and their employer’s obligations when they enter work.
That proposal echoes the practical lesson of her own case: the legal challenge began with records, a prompt objection and union backing, not simply with a court hearing.
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The current dispute-resolution system is different from the multi-stage process she described. The Commission for Mediation and Arbitration now offers mediation and arbitration, and launched its e-Utatuzi platform in January to digitise registration and reduce delays associated with physical files.
Central concerns
That development responds to one of Laeticia’s central concerns. She said her earlier case moved through union and labour-administration levels before a tribunal decision, and that a decision then sat for months before she could obtain it; even after she prevailed, she said, returning to the workplace brought further hardship rather than an immediate end to the dispute.
Her story is also about the distance between formal gains and lived experience. IPU data for August 2026 recorded women holding 147 of 391 seats, or 37.6 per cent, in the National Assembly, a development Laeticia cited as one sign of wider institutional change for women.
For Laeticia, however, progress cannot be measured only through representation or revised statutes. The enduring test, she said, is whether a worker who faces an allegedly unfair decision can identify it, document it, seek help and obtain a remedy before financial pressure or institutional delay makes the right meaningless.
Her decision to revisit Post Abolished more than three decades after its first publication places that question before a generation working under a different legal regime.
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Both the book and the interview do not claim that every workplace dispute has the same cause. They present her case as a record of how one worker’s fight can expose the procedures, relationships and institutions that decide whether employment rights can be used.
“This is a struggle that does not end, and some things repeat themselves just the same,” Laeticia told The Chanzo.
