`agreement’
Ann Eveleth
A high-level government meeting set for March 1 is expected to lay down the law on the use of Zimbabwean farm labour – now widespread in areas of high unemployment along the Northern Province border – by South African farmers.
Department of Labour representative Sello Mosai said the deputy directors general of the departments of labour, home affairs, agriculture and trade and industry would meet next month to map the future of long-standing policy which has allowed South African farmers to bypass local farmworkers in favour of importing cheaper workers from across the border. The practice had been extended again until June this year, pending a finalisation of new policy, he added.
Mosai, a researcher in the department’s labour market policy unit, said the meeting follows consultations with farmers and other stakeholders. “The farmers said they need this policy because they cannot get people with certain skills, like sheep-shearing, in South Africa,” said Mosai.
The Mail & Guardian last week visited a Tshipise citrus farm where about 500 Zimbabwean farmworkers have been employed for R235 per month as strikebusters to replace South African workers demanding higher wages. Beit Bridge border officials reported granting 2 000 to 3 000 Zimbabwean farm labour work permits each month on the basis of “an agreement” between the governments of South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The national Department of Home Affairs told the Northern Province-based Nkuze Development Association in a December 1998 letter that permits are issued in terms of a “special concession granted in terms of a bilateral agreement between the governments of Zimbabwe and South Africa”.
But the departments of home affairs, labour, agriculture and foreign affairs this week denied that any bilateral agreement governing farm labour migration existed between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Department of Home Affairs representative Tumi Maloi said South Africa had signed other agreements on the use of farm and mine labour with the governments of Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland and Mozambique in the 1960s.
Negotiations have, however, taken place over the past year between agricultural unions and various government departments to extend the terms of what appears to be a phantom agreement with Zimbabwe.
Mosai said the practice of granting “no objection” work permits – a sort of express lane for migrant labour where permits are granted at the border – to Zimbabwean farmworkers at the request of South African farmers had been in place for years and continued in terms of the Aliens Control Act of 1991.
A presidential committee on labour market policy recommended in 1997 that the practice be phased out and that such work permits should only be granted in terms of the normal procedures governing foreign work permits.
The 1997 Green Paper on International Migration calls for greater integration of South Africa into the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and paves the way for continued employment for semi-skilled and unskilled migrant labour exclusively from SADC countries. But it also calls for these to be governed by flexible annual quotas; an onus on employers to demonstrate their need to employ SADC citizens; and the extension of all South African employment rights and protections to SADC workers.
But these appear to have been largely ignored by officials involved in the Beit Bridge immigration process.
ENDS