Between Precarity and Paternalism: Farm Workers and Trade Unions in South Africa's Western Cape Province
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The labour market in rural areas of South Africa’s Western Cape province has undergone considerable changes over the last thirty years. New labour and tenure legislation protecting farm workers combined with trade liberalisation, the abolition of subsidies and in-migration from other areas of South Africa has significantly reshaped labour on commercial farms. There is an increasing divide between permanent farm workers and a growing pool of precariously employed workers who labour seasonally on farms and are frequently employed through labour brokers. These divisions came to a head in 2012 when workers, many of whom work seasonally on farms, launched a strike that was to last for six months. Trade unions have struggled to organise an increasingly fragmented rural labour market and at the same time negotiate the forms of paternalism that continue to exert a strong influence over rural labour relations. Based on interviews with trade union organisers, this article examines how they have responded to the twin challenges of labour broking and paternalism. The farm strikes highlight the need for a form of social movement unionism that goes beyond wage demands and tackles the multiple factors that influence poverty in rural areas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".