Hardly a week passes by without Tony Ehrenreich, Cosatu's Western Cape provincial secretary, offering the philosophers here at the Mahogany Ridge some profound example of his fevered thinking and tenuous grasp on reality.
His suggestion that farmers who laid off workers should have their land seized by the government is a case in point.
Obviously he wanted to offend them, and he has succeeded. Well done. It takes a lot to upset farmers these days. But bear in mind, of course, that such menacing utterances are now par for the course; in this regard, Ehrenreich was merely echoing ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe's threat to seize the mothballed operations of mining houses who retrenched workers.
Farmers claim government's decision to increase the daily minimum wage of farm workers by 52 percent to R105 from next month -- a perhaps unsurprising response to the wave of violent strikes that recently rolled across the Western Cape's country towns -- will increase operational costs to the extent that the layoffs are inevitable.
They've already begun. On Wednesday, at least 2 000 workers in Limpopo and Mpumalanga were issued with retrenchment notices and, according to news reports, thousands of other jobs would go once the minimum increases come into effect. This is nothing new; the agricultural sector, it's been estimated, shed about 700 000 jobs between 2000, when minimum wages were first introduced, and 2007.
Now, we would have thought it a good thing that all these workers are moving off the farms simply because it rather comprehensively does away with all that slavery and exploitation stuff that the trade unions were forever banging on about.