Marianne Merten
‘I am a man with three children. My wife earns R11,10 each day. I earn R29 a day.”
Dressed in an immaculately ironed shirt which has faded to off-white with age, this farm worker from Ceres in the Western Cape wanted to remain anonymous.
His story, told to the Employment Conditions Commission last Friday in Worcester, is just one of hundreds from across South Africa that the commission has been told during a series of public hearings over the past few weeks. By July the commission has to advise Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana on minimum wages and conditions for the agricultural sector, which employs almost one million people.
Farmers and workers separately met the commission and Department of Labour officials at the Worcester hearings.
Each of the farmers – around 50 of them, mostly young – represented their agricultural societies from the Koue Bokkeveld to the borders of the Karoo. Uppermost in their minds was the fight for survival after years of drought and bad harvests. Instead of increased export opportunities after the end of sanctions, prices have dropped to levels where, for example, a ton of apples fetches R350 per ton when R800 is needed to break even. With banks knocking on the door and news of bankruptcies becoming more frequent, many farmers worry a minimum wage may just be the difference between bringing in the next harvest and packing up.
In contrast, dozens of farm workers in their tattered Sunday best recounted personal experiences of exploitation and emotional abuse.
“If I am a man, how can I in my heart pay someone R48 per week?” said one. “This is not easy work. It’s hard work. Farm workers are people. We must be treated like people.”
Key concerns emerged: a fair wage, financial security for old age, housing and a legal means to check whether a farmer really has no money to pay workers.
“You can’t even feed your children properly. But you see how the farmer drives around in his posh car,” said grey-haired Francis Anthony, who has worked on the same Stellenbosch farm for 35 years. “Must I leave like my mother, with nothing?”
As is common practice, Lettie Louw’s husband signed an employment agreement with a Stellenbosch farmer in the knowledge that she would also have to work. If he loses his job, she has to move as well. “I live in a one-bedroom house with four people. There has to be three beds in one room and two cupboards. There’s not enough room to breathe. The ceiling is peeling. The toilet is outside,” Louw says. “We don’t want a palace, just something decent.”
For 27 years Wilson Abraham worked on farms and is now a supervisor near Rawsonville. “I’m a plaasbestuurder [farm manager] in name only. I don’t get the money … because I don’t have the qualifications like the white man who does the same work and gets twice as much.”
Yet he is convinced productivity would increase if workers received fair wages. “When our people get enough money to live then, I’ll guarantee the farmers, they will give their best.”
Co-ordinator of the NGO Women on Farms Levurn Jantjies had a similar message. “If you see your farm worker as a human being, I don’t understand the fear about taking a little more out of your pockets for the people who helped you.”
Almost three-quarters of farm workers live below the poverty line. Western Cape farmers generally pay among the best wages – an average of R160 per week for a male farm worker and R120 each week for women. But there are those who pay as little as R70 per week for 12-hour working days.
The Farm Workers’ Coalition, representing unions and NGOs working in rural areas, is proposing a weekly minimum wage of R300 of which no more than a third could be payments in kind.
Decades of distrust between farm workers and farmers have left a deep rural divide. When new laws were introduced to secure tenure rights, some farmers tore down houses. Now workers fear farmers will find ways to avoid a minimum wage.
Years of paternalism also have left their mark. Farmers say they employ those “too uneducated, too simple” to work elsewhere, that more money meant more drinking among workers and houses should only be available to “workers who deserve them” after many years of service.
Farmers claim any minimum wage – preferably linked to government pensions and grants – must take into account that they provide more than other employers. But farm workers say if they are given houses, they pay rent, water and electricity; if there is transport, they pay fares and medical bills sent to farmers are deducted from wage packets.
Ever present in farmers’ minds are tough economic circumstances. They warn a minimum wage could lead to increasing mechanisation, the use of casual workers and subsequent job losses. “The farm owners, one can say, have an ‘own municipality’,” said Hannes Rabie from the Overhex area. “If lawmakers make it difficult for farmers, there’ll just be a bigger stream [of retrenched workers] to towns and an increase in the already critical poverty, unemployment and gangsterism.”
The commission remains optimistic that, like in the problem-ridden security industry, its recommendations for the agricultural sector will balance the need to alleviate poverty and secure economic growth.