Research Report
Global Labour University, Department of Sociology
University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
September 26th, 2014 / This research report looks at the historic farm worker strikes and protests that took place during late
2012 and early 2013, involving thousands of farm workers and the rural poor in the Western Cape, with
a view to answering: 1) why did the protests take place when they did; 2) how did the protests spread
across the Western Cape; and 3) did the mass participation of the protests turn into formal
organisation. The research was conducted primarily through in-depth interviews with participants and
observers of the protests during field visits to the Western Cape in late 2013 and early 2014.
The findings of the report suggest that farm owners, responding to top-down pressures of shifting global
production standards and competition, along with increased government regulation and worker
protections, continue to move toward a more seasonal, outsourced, and off-farm labour force; the
transformation of the workforce is leading to a breakdown or re-negotiation of two of the major
impediments to overt, confrontational, and collective action, namely paternalistic social construction and
farm worker isolation. These longer-term trends combined with the spark of a small, successful strike
and an increasing sense of tactics, strategy, and possibility to ignite a large-scale strike in one of the
major farming towns in the area. With the help of television coverage featuring scenes of this protest
and a clear demand by protestors themselves for an increase in the minimum wage, local organisations
then served as “coordinating” units, alongside a range of more informal networks, to spread the protest
and its easily replicable tactics to towns around the region.
In part because farm workers do not have meaningful access to the more institutional vehicles for
expressing their grievances, the protests took on a more bottom-up, “spontaneous” nature and spread,
with the strategy of disruption and its emerging repertoires of contention serving as key sources of
power. Because of the unique nature of the protests and the shifting nature of farm worker identities,
most of the participating organisations were unsuccessful at translating the mass participation of the
protests into greatly expanded levels of formal organisation. This challenge of turning participation into
organisation was exacerbated by a major backlash by farm owners after the protest, as well as by some
of the organising approaches of these organisations during and after the protests. The report
concludes that there may be reasons for hope as the protests seem to have created some expanded
confidence and leadership among farm workers, even if they did not primarily challenge power on the
farms; the question remains as to whether this historic uprising can lead to further transformation from
below.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/16973 |
| Date | 13 February 2015 |
| Creators | Wilderman, Jesse |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
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