Cape Town - As the grape harvesting season is coming to an end and coinciding with Human Rights month, a civil society organisation is shining a light on the rights of farmworkers, especially women working on commercial wine farms.
Women on Farms Project marched to Distell in Stellenbosch – a leading producer and marketer of wines, spirits and ciders in South Africa – demanding an end to labour rights violations on commercial wine farms in South Africa.
The marchers demanded, among other things, that the distillery commit to advocating for the redistribution of farmland to women and intervene in the failing share equity schemes of its suppliers to ensure transparency, openness and accountability to farmworkers and, shareholders, making human rights part of its supply chain.
The organisation said while farmers and companies like Distell celebrate the end of the harvest and anticipate greater profits and wealth, for women on farms the period signals the bleak reality of unemployment, hunger and poverty.
It said during this off-season period these women must creatively feed their families with their paltry unemployment insurance, social grants and high-interest loans from loan sharks.
It said instead of farmers sharing their profits with farmworkers for securing the harvest, female farmworkers continued to experience abuse from farmers, exposure to pesticides, absence of toilets in the vineyards, and unlawful evictions from farms.
Director Colette Solomon said Distell boasted that its growth was a result of its resilience and agility.
However, as the organisation they contend that the profits of the distillery and commercial wine farmers were largely the result of the increasingly precarious and casualised labour of women farmworkers.
“The march is to highlight the inequalities that have still not been addressed in South Africa and also to put on notice companies like Distell to recognise they have a corporate moral responsibility to look at the various parts of their value chain and the farms that supply them and to ensure that the rights of workers on the farms are upheld,” she said.
Distell said it believed dialogue and engagement were key to finding solutions that best transform the wine industry.
As a leading player in the wine industry and a key proponent of the industry’s transformation, it accepted the memorandum and would forward it to the relevant structures to receive the necessary attention.