Fay Davids
SOUTH AFRICA’S fastest-growing farmworkers’ union – the South African Agricultural Plantation and Allied Workers Union (Saapawu) – is meeting on Friday, February 21, in its first-ever congress.
At the top of its agenda is a plan to counter the South African Agricultural Union’s (SAAU) lobby against the Security of Tenure Bill.
Union representative Dickson Motha says: “We have a problem with evictions and we are going to respond to the SAAU.” The union also plans to begin lobbying against the continued use of child labour in the agricultural industry.
Saapawu is affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions and in the past two years has collected a paid-up membership of 33 000 workers. “The figure is below expectations but there were many retrenchments during last season’s drought,” says Motha.
It has been no easy task organising in the industry, where a lack of resources makes it very difficult to build up membership as unionists often don’t have access to transport.
David Canham of the Farmworkers Research and Resource Project says that farms are not like factories. Trade unions in that sector need to organise very differently.
“Work and living conditions, for example, are equally important,” he says.
He adds that trade unions need to begin working out methods of increasing membership on small farms because “the majority of farms have less than 10 workers, whereas unions concentrate on farms with more than 20 workers”.