Mukoni T Ratshitanga
The 35 000-strong South African Agricultural Plantation and Allied Workers’ Union, which represents farm workers, will meet its Mozambican counterpart later this month to deal with the exploitation of alien labour in South Africa.
The union’s general secretary, Dickson Motha, this week said they aim “to develop a common strategy on how to deal with the exploitation of immigrant labour on South African farms. We have taken a resolution to fight the exploitation of immigrant labour.”
Motha added the two unions want to ensure that South African farmers in Mozambique also adopt fair labour relations.
Plans for the meeting follow the mass employment of thousands of Mozambican nationals on South African farms. The Mail & Guardian can confirm that scores of Northern Province farmers are employing Mozambicans as labourers in what appears to be an attempt to avoid paying decent wages to South Africans.
Most of the labourers are picked up in refugee camps strewn around the former Gazankulu homeland. Others stream on to the farms straight from Mozambique.
The farmers employ the desperate Mozambicans for periods of two to three months and then lay them off.
South African farm workers in the province have expressed disquiet about the employment of Mozambicans who are prepared to work for low wages. They say the foreign workers are taking away their jobs.
“The prospect of permanant work on the farms will soon be extinct if this continues,” said an irate farm worker from Mooketsi in the Lowveld.
Mozambicans who spoke to the M&G last week said they are prepared to work for low wages as “a relief” after years of unemployment and suffering. They say they are housed and fed well, even though “our wages do not match our work”. But they complain about the short periods of employment and would prefer permanent work.
“We are people too. We deserve to be treated like everybody else. We too are children of God – only our country is in the mess that it is in,” said ex-labourer Joseph Shirinda.
Some labourers alleged farm managers and foremen threaten them with deportation. Workers at the Bangani Beleggins ZZ2 farm at Mooketsi claimed the foremen often beat them in front of the farm manager, accusing them of laziness. The farm is one of a string owned by the world’s largest tomato farmer, Berti van Zyl.
Van Zyl’s farms truck a daily minimum of 20000 boxes of tomatoes to the Johannesburg City Deep market. He owns 95% of the farms between Munnik and Pietersburg, and apple, pear and onion farms in Ceres in the Western Cape.
Although the labourers told the M&G they are happy with the housing Van Zyl provides, they complained that their wages are not commensurate with their work.
“I pick tomatoes for the whole day and yet I only get R150 a month. I work six days a week – sometimes on Sundays – from six in the morning until six in the afternoon,” says Daniel Shithlangu, one of thousands of Mozambicans who work on Van Zyl’s tomato farms.
It is his second term of employment there. Last year, he was laid off after three months, following a tomato harvest and planting period. Now he is picking tomatoes again.
But some labourers are content with their low wages. Khensani Mashe says the “money I get is little, but it is better than Mozambique, where there is no employment at all”.
Van Zyl refused to answer complaints levelled against his management, saying “there are people who want to hurt me. There are enough courts and enough laws protecting workers in South Africa today for the minister of labour himself to come to my farm and sort me out if I am guilty of such practices.
“I am as sympathetic to the Mozambican farm workers as I am to any black person in the Northern Province. I do not discriminate between a Mozambican, a Sotho or a Venda. My heart bleeds for all black unemployed people – and there are millions of them …”