Don’t buy South African wines: striking workers’ plea to consumers

Johannesburg:- Outside the tiny public library, a dozen striking grape pickers wait for a meeting called by their employer. “He wants to force us back to work,’’ says one woman. “We are hungry but we will wait for a better wage,’’ says another employee of Keurboschkloof farm.After trouble in South African labour relations last year led to a two-month violent standoff in the mining sector, the country’s economy is now under pressure from a stop-start farm labourers’ strike in the £850m-a-year fruit and wine sector. Since November, low-skilled workers demanding a pay increase to 150 rand per day (£10.65) have clashed with police and been arrested in their hundreds. Amid allegations of excessive police force, three have died.Unions and charities supporting the Western Cape’s 500,000 farmworkers say pay and working conditions are so bad that South African wines, table grapes and granny smith apples should be as unacceptable for responsible British consumers as they were under apartheid. “The government should be forcing the farmers to the table but it is not,’’ said Nosey Pieterse, secretary general of the black agricultural sector union, Bawusa. “Our only weapon left is for the foreign buyers to pledge that unless the conditions are addressed, they will no longer import South African products.’’Whereas striking miners are typically up against faceless London-listed corporations, South African farmworkers face a different battle. Most are not unionised, many are illiterate and face the danger of eviction because they live on their employers’ properties. Poorly enforced labour rights and tenancy legislation as well as the pitifully low statutory daily minimum wage in the sector – 69.39 rand (£4.92) – perpetuate paternalism.When farmer Anton De Vries arrives, slightly late, at De Doorns library, he hugs each of the female strikers. They laugh and, if anything, seem pleased to see him. “You see, there is no problem,’’ says De Vries, whose company, South African Fruit Exporters, manages Keurboschkloof farm and its 300 employees. “They want to work. They are being intimidated into striking. We do lots of empowerment things in our company.’’