Number 77 Steel Road, New Era, Springs. The address where your favourite breakfast cereal is transformed from maize concentrates to the fibre-laden meal you tuck into at the start of your day. Those involved in this “transformation” are as invisible as the process that produces the cornflakes and bran derivatives we gobble down.
History plays a tragic and at times unsettling game. Circuitous returns to past tensions, contests and struggles are a reminder that the old morphs into the new with startling continuities.
No story is a stronger reminder of this than that of the Dlamini family. From 1977 Chris Ndodebandla Dlamini worked at 77 Steel Road for Kellogg’s, the famed breakfast cereal maker. Eight years later, due to his reputation for painstaking organising on the East Rand, he was elected as the founding deputy president of a new labour federation, Cosatu.
Fast forward nearly three decades later and Steven Mwelase, who joined the same firm in 1979 (two years after Dlamini did and worked as a temporary employee until 2018) has been retrenched. The only other alternative open to him, at the advanced age of 60, is to take up a non-production role as a “merchandiser” at Savemoor Cash and Carry — a novel task for the experienced factory worker.
The case of the Kellogg’s workers is a reminder that declaratory orders from the courts, regulations and policy are just that — words on pieces of paper. In the absence of defending, advancing and fighting for these to mean something, they are empty.
Coincidentally, Dlamini’s daughter, 53-year-old Mabotlhale Dlamini, is also one of the workers alongside Mwelase who have been dismissed over the last few weeks for not attending a training session for their new roles, but ostensibly for taking Kellogg’s to court to give effect to the new worker rights emerging from the landmark Assign Services Constitutional Court judgment on the interpretation of Section 189A of the Labour Relations Act.
Mabotlhale was 16 when her father, as then Cosatu president, called for a “consumer boycott” of Kellogg’s and then Simba-Quix products, following worker action at these firms. Now 37 years later, it must seem like a familial bout of déjà vu, with devastating consequences. The silence of the mainstream unions (even the federation her father and his “comrades” built) is deafening.
Following negotiations with management, Mwelase and his colleagues were able to see an improvement in their pay, from R34 to R74 an hour. To place this in perspective, before his raise, Mwelase earned less in an hour than the price of a 750g box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes (which sold for just over R40 in 2017 and 2018), after nearly four decades in that role. One wonders how many of those boxes he helped produce in that period.
The story of these workers and many others like them is not unique. We have seen this in the mining sector where generations of migrant workers from the Eastern Cape, Lesotho, Mozambique and other places join an intergenerational line of risk, exploitation and ailment. Sons join the well-worn path travelled by fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers to the mines.
Elsewhere, in January many economists, organised business and cabinet ministers called for greater collaboration between business, the government and labour. Pacts, partnerships and power plays have characterised much of the policy conversations.
The case of the Kellogg’s workers is a reminder that declaratory orders from the courts, regulations and policy are just that — words on pieces of paper. In the absence of defending, advancing and fighting for these to mean something, they are empty. Despite commitments to the contrary at the jobs summit, retrenchments continue. Despite the national minimum wage coming into effect a month ago, the likes of Fleeceytex Knitting in Alberton continue to shirk their responsibilities to workers and fraudulently circumvent the exemption system.
In the dark crevices of factory floors, stuffy CCMA meeting rooms and over hot enamel coffee mugs, many workers and businesses alike seem far from the harmony and conciliatory tone of the pacts, partnerships and accords made in air-conditioned offices.
Cosatu is on strike before Valentine’s Day. One is sure that the Mwelase and Dlamini families will not be found on the picket lines. Their subscriptions may have never reached the shop stewards. Sometimes the intergenerational connections of struggle, within the same firm and, in the case of the Dlamini family, the same family play ominous games with the present.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts Power Business on Power FM.
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