Farm worker disputes
http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk
Farm workers are clashing with new farmers of grabbed properties amid
reports of bad farm management, changes of employment, appalling
remuneration and a bleak future.
23.09.1110:31am
by Fungai Kwaramba Harare
Many farm workers witnessed how the black farm owners grabbed the land, and
some were caught up in the often-violent evictions.
“We were better off under Mr Watson,” said one farm worker, Nyasha Mutero.
According to the General Agriculture Plantation Workers Union, there are 350
000 black farm workers, many of whom thought they would be beneficiaries of
land reform programmes.
The farm workers say they been paid erratically and are forced to work
longer hours than they had previously been expected to work. Amid the
friction is emerging a new class of land barons who, under pressure from
restive workers have called back the previous owner and leased the land to
him under a profit sharing arrangement. Mugabe has sternly warned against
such a practice.
The war veterans occupying white-owned farms in Zimbabwe say farm workers
are sabotaging their operations because of their attachment to the previous
owners and their own ambitions to own land.
“It’s difficult to work with these people my brother,” said Richard Gono, a
successful flower farmer who grabbed his farm from a white-owner in 2003.
“They feign illness, steal, sabotage the operation and simply refuse to
cooperate. They would rather be under a white farmer. There is urgent need
for a paradigm shift. The farm workers need to be told that this is
irreversible. Baas is not coming back.”
Sources in the Indigenous Commercial Farmers Union and General Agricultural
Plantation Workers Union acknowledged, some off the record, the widespread
friction between the new black owners and their inherited workers.