COSATU to support farmers by targeting retailers for profiteering and colluding on agricultural products
6th February 2013
COSATU will be launching a campaign against retailers who pay farmers a pittance for the products that are produced on South African farms. Research has shown that retailers are setting ridiculously low prices for products that they buy from farms. It is partly these practices that have seen the distorted pricing structure in agriculture. This information shows how retailers have been central in structuring the Apartheid style cost practices in agriculture and how retailers promoted, profited and benefited from low slave wages, there will be protest in major retail stores on 27 February 2013
The workers have won a victory on the farms, in relation to moving their wages away from the slave-wage structure of Apartheid. That energy will now be directed at retailers. We intend protesting at the main stores of the retailers on 27th February 2013, as COSATU, with farm workers and retail workers. Our retail unions will be taking up the issue of pricing agricultural products with the 4 main retail stores in South Africa. We are also calling on the Government Employees Pension Fund to come into the negotiations to urge more responsible trading practices, as they are the biggest shareholders, in retailers.
Farmers should, instead of making threats to fire workers, be working with the unions and Government to ensure that they get decent prices from the retailers and that there is more international market access for their products. Government should also come to the party and ensure that there are subsidies that support farmers to the same extent that competing markets are subsidised. This however can only follow a comprehensive land reform process, where workers are real partners, in setting a coherent agricultural industrial policy.
We want to work with good farmers and their associations to find solutions, but bad farmers who now want to dismiss workers as spite for the higher wages set, must get out of agriculture and out of the country. We need patriots who will build partnerships between farmers and farm workers to craft a new agricultural sector. There is no place for those who still want to practice baasskap mentality. Government must take their land, with minimal compensation, so real farming communities can develop that land in the national interest.
Agri SA has really let down farmers badly in these developments in the agricultural sector. They tabled an amount of R94 at the Employment Conditions Commission, as what they wanted as the new minimum wage, so clearly there was some mandate to engage with the wage issue. This is in spite of them maintaining throughout the wage strike that they did not have a mandate to negotiate wages. They took this sector into the brink of a civil war, with their baasskap attitude of not wanting to recognise or negotiate with workers and their organisations. They now have a Government set wage imposed on them, and still they try and undermine it, further intensifying the historical hostility that exist between farmers and farm workers.
Here was an opportunity where Agri SA could have developed a more sophisticated approach to the negotiations that could have seen them win fundamental victories. They could have offered a R100 new minimum wage, which would have bought incredible goodwill. They could then in return have asked Government to give them some subsidies, assist them to get greater foreign market access, and define a clearer pricing structure with the support of labour for the local retailers. National Government should also be asked to fund water and electricity on farms. There was however no leadership in Agri SA to explore this new route, that could have seen a win-win situation.
The absurdity of Michael Bagraim, Chairperson the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who supported the DA in labelling this a political action against the DA rather than a desperate struggle by workers earning slave wages of R69 a day, is condemned. This business body, which must assist to ameliorate conflict, must stop taking party-political sides, as it is just an affront to its black members. CCCI was seen to be supporting exploitation and the maintenance of the apartheid generational advantage, which is a core agenda of the DA, and has to answer for this to its black members.
We remain hopeful that good faith negotiations will find solutions, but we can assure all the role players that a new sector will be structured by workers, with or without them. The strike has shown that the present trajectory is unsustainable, and will only see deepening conflict.
Statement issued by COSATU Western Cape Provincial Secretary, Tony Ehrenreich, and COSATU Western Cape Provincial Chairperson, Dan Malapi, February 6 2013
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