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.
But no. It now seems that liberating farm workers from the shackles of their grinding poverty and back-breaking existence, freeing them up to make their way to the cities and there fend for themselves at traffic lights and in the parking lots of supermarkets, was not quite what Ehrenreich had in mind.
Perversely, he apparently wants workers to remain the serfs in some sort of feudal system. True, he wants to deny the feudal lords the benefits of said feudalism, but it's still bondage as far as the serfs are concerned. We do wish he'd make up his mind.
One example that could perhaps show the way forward was that of Nosey Pieterse, one of the rabble rousers in the Western Cape strikes.
Incongruously, he is the president of both the Black Association of the Wine and Spirit Industry, or Bawsi, and the Bawsi Agricultural Workers Union of SA. In addition to his directorship of at least 15 companies, Pieterse owns an 18-hectare farm near Saldanha, which, for our purposes, is most instructive.
It has pigs, sheep, geese, pumpkins, mealies, at least one cow and just two workers -- both of whom are family members who reported being well looked after and who each earned more than R150 a day. Clearly it's not the sort of farm where much slavery takes place. There are possible explanations. One was that not much else took place there either, especially agriculture. Another was that machines did the work.
If the latter, then Pieterse has joined the growing ranks of farmers who've mechanised their operations. The process has been unfolding for some years now, but will no doubt accelerate given the events of the past six months.
The bad news is that some produce remains labour-intensive -- machines tend to struggle with certain basic fruit and vegetables -- and hence the high prices down at the local supermarket. Hence, also, the disturbing fact that, according to the University of Cape Town's African Food Security Network, as many as 12 million South Africans go to bed hungry each night because they cannot afford to feed themselves.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter -- wine security. Wine, like coffee and cigarettes, is an important food group. Down here at the Ridge we swear blind by it.
The quandary, though, is how to get the wine without the slavery. The activists have been extremely busy in recent weeks trying to convince us that we shouldn't enjoy the stuff because it is tainted with the blood of the workers and soured by the sweat of their shackled drudgery and, unbearably, they show no signs of stopping. The activists, that is.
Perhaps busloads of tourists could be persuaded that the harvesting of grapes, especially against the magnificent backdrop of the Boland mountains, is a romantic and desirable activity, the sort of thing poets and lovers do.
They would pay handsomely for the privilege and opportunity of such a true rustic experience. Everyone would win.
This article first appeared in The Weekend Argus.
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