Farmers to be probed for labour cheating

The department of Labour is investigating employers of farmworkers and domestic workers in Musina, Limpopo, who exploit undocumented foreign workers by offering them low wages and then blowing the whistle on them on payday.The department met with stakeholders on Thursday in Musina, where it explained that the huge number of problems afflicting migrant workers in the area meant there was an urgent need for all stakeholders to work together to end the super-exploitation.The migrants, who are mostly from Zimbabwe, are said to be offered less than the legal minimum wage and are then turned over to the authorities for deportation when they are due to be paid.The stakeholders who attended the meeting were Lawyers for Human Rights, the Musina Legal Advice Office, the International Organisation for Migration, Doctors Without Borders, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the immigration section of the Department of Home Affairs and the Red Cross.

Albert Tshidavhu, the chief director of provincial operations in Limpopo, said: “The fact that employers of farmworkers and domestic workers disregard labour laws around minimum wages and contracts of employment is worsened by the fact that workers operate without permits in South Africa. This shows a need for collaborative efforts by all stakeholders to make the job of the department easy in protecting the rights of vulnerable workers.”

He said the stakeholders had to work with the department because it was not within its remit to help undocumented migrants.He said that because these workers were undocumented, they did not take the details of their employers. When they were supposed to be paid, a farmer would trump up allegations that they had stolen something and, in cahoots with local police or friends in the police, get them arrested and deported without pay.Tshidavhu said only one local farmer had attended the meeting. His workers were all documented and he was paying them according to the sectoral determination.The telephone of the Musina police station was continually engaged on Friday, indicating a fault.

Henk van de Graaf, a spokesman for the Transvaal Agricultural Union, said: “If a farmer is contravening the law, he must take the consequences. We tell our members not to employ illegal immigrants. If border control was enough, we would not have this problem.” Tshidavhu said the Department of Home Affairs had resumed deporting the undocumented Zimbabweans as from the beginning of the month, which meant the Home Affairs directive giving them a moratorium of six months to work on the farms had come to an end. A Home Affairs official referred to an October 6 statement by Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma about the end of the Zimbabwe Documentation Project, in which she said there was no moratorium on deportation for Zimbabweans who broke South Africa’s immigration laws.

 Wiseman Khuzwayo