Some pigs are more equal than others – the ANC and the workers

09 July 2014 - 14:48 By Bruce Gorton
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One of the things that struck me a few weeks back was when Agriculture minister Senzeni Zokwana proclaimed proudly that he would set an example by paying his cattle-herder minimum wage.

“The minister commits himself to leading the sector by example and encourages all farm owners to comply with the minimum wage as stipulated by the sectoral determination committee,” spokesperson Palesa Mokomele said.

Obeying the law is not the same thing as being generous or even morally good – it is doing the absolute bare minimum.

And here he was “setting an example” by paying his worker exactly as badly as the law allowed.

That was the story that flashed through my brain when I read about National Chairperson of Provinces Thandi Modise and her ‘little farm of horrors.’

She claims that she had a farm manager running the place, and that after he left for a family emergency she hired a temporary one to fill in for two weeks.

When the SPCA raided her farm, finding it had degenerated to the point where the pigs were eating each other and drinking their own urine, as well as various other animals being so starved and neglected they had to be put down, there were no staff on the premises.

Now understand something here – people don’t just leave their jobs overnight because the manager took some leave. When Aurora Mining didn’t pay its workers, they kept on working for months – some people will try to make anything work.

So the fact that her farm had no staff on it at all, the fact that things didn’t even sort of remain running, indicates to me that even those people had given up.

It indicates to me that there must have been some really deep, longstanding grievances at play.

And this is the party that is supposed to be all about the worker, two thirds of the tripartite alliance is made up of the SA Communist Party and Cosatu for crying out loud.

Yet we see they proudly pay minimum wage.

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