Gilfillan
A marble bust of Queen Victoria adorns the front of the Graaff-Reinet town hall, the interior of which is hung with crystal chandeliers, where farmers and farmworkers gathered this week to express their views on a minimum wage and conditions of employment.
A series of similar meetings has, over recent weeks, quietly taken place under the auspices of the Department of Labour. They form part of the process initiated by Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana to regulate working conditions, including the question of a minimum wage under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act.
The crisply attired farm owners contradicted the usual stereotype of the khaki-clad, pot-bellied South African farmer. Included among these great- grandsons of settlers was a young, chic and articulate woman farmer – all had been invited to express opinions on whether wages ought to be determined according to factors such as sector, area, workers’ levels of skill, and so on.
Meeting chair Tembi Mkalipi, director of labour relations from East London, explained that, while the minimum wage is open to negotiation, the principle itself is not. A pall of suspicion hung over the group, for whom it was clearly an initiation into the consultative process.
The point of the meeting was to elicit a broad response from individual employers – not all of whom are members of farmers’ associations.
Mkalipi explained that the workshop was the start of an information gathering process, but responses from the farmers were slow and tentative and consisted mainly of defensive utterances about their concerns of protecting the jobs of their workers.
When the matter of in-kind payments (housing, food, fuel) was discussed, the ingrained paternalism of the system expressed itself in one farmer’s view: ”Farms are communities, and in-kind payments have become entrenched over time.”
Reluctant to suggest actual figures for a minimum wage because this would somehow imply an acceptance of the principle, farmers spun the usual web of rationalisations: ”We treat our labourers well, we have to ensure that they have enough food for the month and don’t blow their cash.”
In an area where the average monthly wage (inclusive of in-kind payments) is R700, Mkalipi informed the group that at other meetings in the Eastern Cape, farmers had suggested figures of not less than R200 and not more than R1 000. He warned that negative perceptions of farmers needed to be changed, particularly regarding exploitative wages.
The creative response to this of the only Afrikaans-speaking farmer present was that a maximum rather than a minimum wage ought to be established to safeguard wage and employment levels. ”These people are our family,” he said.
At midday, a small group of l3 farmworkers, representing six farms in the district, showed just how dysfunctional relations in these farm ”families” are.
Again, a pall of suspicion hung in the air, as the workers sized up the officials seated before them.
Worker attendance was – as with similar meetings held from Cradock to Komga – so poor as to mock the consultative process.
When asked why, workers explained that they were at the mercy of employers for transport and information and that, while employers had brought them to the meeting, they had not been informed of its purpose, and so were ill-prepared.
They disclosed that current cash wages ranged between R204 and R580 per month. The figures workers then proceeded to suggest for a minimum wage mocked the fears employers had expressed earlier regarding their expectations. With neither anger nor outrage this most marginalised group of workers suggested cash wages between R800 and R1 000.
The abyss that exists between the perceptions of farm owner and worker may be widening. For one member of the farmer’s ”family” at least: ”Dinge gaan nie lekker op die plase nie [Things aren’t going well on the farms].”
However, even if there is little material improvement after 2001 when this complex piece of legislation is expected to be passed, at the very least, farm owners and workers are slowly being integrated into those processes that form the fabric of a culture of rights.
This is because employers in these sectors are widespread, often in unreachable areas and seldom a visible presence in the economy. If one thinks of the impossibility of trying to track down even a small national sample of households that employ domestic workers, as well as extracting wage information from the employer or employee, then the difficulty in monitoring these two sectors becomes evident.
Simply put, the effectiveness of any minimum wage legislation will depend on the state’s ability to enforce and monitor the implementation by employers of the terms of the legislation.
Together with the difficulties in monitoring such legislation, its employment effects as well as employers’ possible responses – the minimum wage legislation proposed here should be, at best, viewed as setting a precedent for employers to improve their wages and other conditions of employment for these two indigent groups of workers.
The goal of poverty reduction among domestic and farm workers is thus only realistically achievable through a combination of economic policy interventions.
Haroon Bhorat is senior researcher in the development policy research unit at the University of Cape Town’s School of Economics