South Africa’s Apartheid Hangs On: Armed Farm Workers Battle Cops, Close Highways

WESTERN CAPE PROVINCE, SOUTH AFRICA, January 12 — Thousands of farm workers toiling in this area’s vineyards and on grape and fruit farms have been wildcatting since October 30, demanding doubling of their starvation wages. The region is of huge financial importance to both wine production and tourism, but the farm workers still feel the brunt of Apartheid abuses, which is netting huge profits for the vineyard owners, in a $3.3 billion industry.
The strikers have clashed with bosses, scabs, private security goons and the police who have fired rubber bullets at the workers and called in helicopters for reinforcements. But the workers have answered back.
In the town of Grabow the strikers armed with clubs have been fighting running battles with riot cops. They have barricaded key highways to cause maximum disruption and to prevent scabs from getting to the farms. It was only when they set fire to bushes, caravans, bulldozers and police cars that the government began to pay attention.
The strikers blocked the major highway running through DeDoorms, hurling stones. The town is in the center of one of the biggest vineyard areas producing for the grape export industry. On January 9, the wildcatters burnt tires and cars and threw stones at the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets. The battle closed the main highway linking Cape Town and Johannesburg.
The workers are demanding a wage hike to $17.65 per day, more than double their current $8 daily wage. One worker told Reuters he had worked on the farms since the 1970s when the daily wage was 45 rand [$5]. “Now we get 65 rand [$8]. What is that?” he said. “We want 150 rand [$17.65].”
 A strike leader, Shaun Janca, told the Daily Maverick, “We work our whole lives but still we have nothing.”
The area is one of the most affluent and financially viable produce areas in the country but pay the workers hunger wages. An August 2011 report from Human Rights Watch detailed the horrendous working and living conditions practiced by local farm owners: housing unfit for living; exposure to fertilizers and pesticides without proper safety equipment; lack of access to water while working in dehydrating conditions; lack of toilet facilities; threats of evictions and pressure on workers to stop them from joining unions.
The bosses also hire immigrant workers from outside the country who often don’t have passports. This enables profit-hungry farm owners to super-exploit a vulnerable migrant labor force and set them against local workers.
This uprising follows on the heels of widespread strikes of platinum miners and truckers who suffer from similar conditions and battled for some of the same demands several months ago, seeing the cops murder 34 of their brothers. South Africa is seething from the continuation of the Apartheid of the old white regime that is now run by the African National Congress government. Black oppressors have joind white ones and capitalism’s racist exploitation reigns on. A strike leader told the BBC that they have been met with nothing but “naked racism and white arrogance.”
Such militant struggle by these farm workers needs to be turned into class struggle against the whole racist capitalist system to emancipate the working class from the hell of the profit system.