Black farm workers still exploited

THE South African agriculture sector was conveniently founded on the harsh premise of the exploitation of black farm workers as cheap labour.

Despite 28 years of so-called freedom, this has not changed. And it is not about to change any time soon. That’s why the labour markets in the sector, especially the commercial fruit and vegetable industries, have now resorted to exploiting undocumented and heavily underpaid foreign workers from Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Malawi.

No leopard can ever change its spots. One of the major reasons the

Afrikaner-led apartheid government created the homelands in the first place was to remove black share-croppers from the land to stop them from competing with poor white farmers, and to transform them into cheap labour.

If you doubt the veracity of this, you can ask Ntate Kas Maine from his grave, where his holy spirit has been since 1985. Why would this exploitation change when there are more unemployed black people to be exploited? There is no law that can change this, as long as there are desperate people who are willing to sell their labour for peanuts.

There is a good reason why white people don’t do farm labour under supervision in South Africa, but will gladly do it in the US.

It is demeaning and degrading to be treated as an overhead cost, rather than a human being. Where else in the world can anyone work for the so-called minimum wage of R21.50 per hour but in South Africa?

And the foreigners are even prepared to work for a measly R10 per hour. No wonder De Doorns in the Western Cape and Addo and Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape are overflowing with undocumented people from elsewhere in Africa.

If the South African fruit industry cannot even afford that minimum wage, how could they ever pay the workers a decent living wage? MPUMELELO NCWADI | Wisconsin, USA