Paper short abstract:

This paper compares if and how farmworker livelihoods have changed since the heyday of Apartheid, and the role of the state in these changes. While farmworkers enjoy vastly more legal protection than in the past, most may in fact be economically worse off .

Paper long abstract:

This paper compares if and how farmworker livelihoods have changed since the heyday of Apartheid, and the role of the state in these changes. While farmworkers enjoy vastly more legal protection than in the past, most may in fact be worse off economically. This lack of improvement can be attributed to the state's contradictory policy approach towards the sector: while it extended protection to farmworkers post-1994, it withdrew regulatory support from producers that previously forced them to bargain collectively with international retailers. Since the 1980s, international retailers have increasingly consolidated and formed buyer monopolies, so producers now face extremely powerful bargaining partners as individuals and have therefore become price takers. To protect their profit margins and to cope with the "pincer effect" of public and private regulation, producers have externalised and casualised their labour forces, and moved workers, who previously benefited from on-farm housing, off-farm. The research points to the limited power of the state to regulate employer-employee relations that are embedded in global value chains, and to the problematic of relying on a narrowly rights-based approach to remedy working conditions. While aiming to regulate employer-employee relations within its national jurisdiction, the state has failed to insulate such relations from the power wielded in the global fruit value chain that shapes relations right into the farmyard. Such power relations not only shape the commercial relations between international retailers and local producers, but also between local producers and their workers.