Glenda Daniels
In a major departure, the government has suggested incentives, rather than penalties, to induce farmers to observe a new minimum wage for farm workers.
Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana announced proposals for minimum rates for close to a million agricultural employees this week, ranging from R400 to R750 a month. They are the product of a two-year investigation.
Farm workers have historically been excluded from minimum wage legislation, despite the virtual absence of farm workers’ union organisation and the lowest wages of any formal sector.
The document released by Mdladlana proposes that farmers who comply with new minimum rates for fair labour practices would be eligible for state support. This might include discounted interest on loans from the Land Bank. The announcement drew immediate expressions of concern from organised agriculture.
Director of labour and development at AgriSA Kobus Kleynhans said he would have to study the proposal carefully. He added: “The biggest cost to the sector is labour at R7,5-billion a year. If this increases substantially, the only way to balance the books would be to lay off workers and this is what we want to avoid.”
The department found that the average farm worker earns R544 a month, the lowest formal sector wage. It proposes a sliding scale of minimum rates, based on a four-way classification of farms. In the wealthier farms of group one Worcester, Bredasdorp, Ceres and Stellenbosch the proposed minimum is R750 a month. In group four Albany, Barberton, Harrismith and Hoopstad the proposal is R400 a month. The conditions will not apply to farms that employ five or fewer workers.
Reaction to the proposals will be sifted by the Employment Conditions Commission before they become law.
The Department of Labour also recommends a ban on farm work for children under the age of 15 years, and a ban on night work between for those aged between 15 and 18 years. The investigations found that a third of all farm workers’ children are stunted, and that one in five is underweight.
Other findings, which painted an alarming picture of conditions on farms, are:
l Half the workers interviewed said that on occasions they worked for 55 hours or more in a week, and one in 10 said they sometimes worked for 72 hours.
l Of the 54% who said they worked longer than the legal limit of 45 hours a week, most were not paid overtime.
l Farm workers have the lowest literacy rates in the country.
l Children younger than 14 years were found to be working on farms in seven of the nine provinces.
l More than 90% of male workers did not get annual paid leave.
Employers were found to be fairly reasonable in what they were prepared to concede, according to the department’s report. Three-quarters agreed to a minimum of R20 a day. However, they also said they would respond to the new minima by increasing mechanisation and rationalising their labour force.
Kleynhans said the farming sector is important as an entry to the labour market. “They come in with no skills or few skills, acquire them and move on. But if you put too high a minimum on wages, it will make this difficult.”
Andries du Toit, senior researcher of the Plaas Unit at the University of the Western Cape, agreed there would be problems of enforcement. “The Department of Labour has not been able to effectively monitor wage conditions already in place. There are serious capacity problems in the state. But the minimum-wage issue will give people in labour the opportunity to act.”