South African farmers have started laying off labourers just two days after the government raised the minimum wage for the sector by 50 per cent in response to a wave of violent farm strikes, an industry official said on Wednesday.
The government hiked the base wage to 105 rand (US$11.86) a day on Monday but farm owners, most of whom are from the white minority, said they could not afford to pay their mostly black workers the increase and layoffs would ensue.
“Some of our farmers have already given notice to some of their workers because if they don’t it now, they will have to pay the remuneration according to the new wages, meaning an extra cost,” Louis Meintjes, president of commercial farmers group Tau SA, told Reuters.
“We can already talk of thousands of workers given notices that they will be let go.”
The new minimum wage comes into effect on March 1.
The job losses could spark a repeat of the violence in which police had to use rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse protesting farm workers blocking highways and torching vineyards and warehouses in the agricultural belt east of Cape Town.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via South Africa farm layoffs start after wage hike.
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