Wot about the workers!? 19 December 2006

The new entrepreneur defends their interests against the old entrepreneur,
writes Tim James in a recent article in Noseweek.

That good and philosphical soul Christo Wiese has obviously been following the advice of Voltaire and cultivating his garden. Lourensford Estate, the winery he bought some years ago to add to Lanzerac in what is called (with characteristic modest charm) ‘the Christo Wiese Portfolio’, has won a wine tourism award for ‘Best Parks, Gardens and the Environment’.

I hesitate, nonetheless, to go out to the Helderburg to admire Mr Wiese’s proteas and petunias. Although one cannot afford to be too picky and choosy about wine on politico-moral grounds (the alternative is largely condemnation to water), lines must be drawn. I prefer to keep Mr Wiese on the other side of that line – and the Lourensford wines are not (yet?) good enough to corrupt me from my self-righteousness in this regard.

Recently I learnt that someone else shares my distaste. Mr Wiese is, predictably, well in with that champion of decency and unadulterated sauvignon blanc, KWV – including buying and selling sizeable chunks of the company as mood and market swings take him. At the company’s recent AGM he was due to be nodded through as a director, when, lo and behold, a principled challenged emerged! I confess I was amused but not altogether surprised to hear of it. Or was I surprised but not amused? I can’t quite recall.

Calling it a principled challenge is going too far, actually, as it was little more than a gesture with a rather opportunistic gloss to it. The ‘empowerment’ grouping Phetogo holds about a quarter of KWV’s shares. One of its sections, Bawsi (Black Association of the Wine and Spirits Industry) had wanted to oppose Wiese’s nomination because of the way he treats his workers; but the rest of the newly empowered in Phetogo didn’t seem to think that treating workers badly was enough reason to vote against such a nice and important man. The compromise position was to sit on their handsduring voting, and Wiese was elected unnopposed.

Meanwhile, in the street outside, a group of farmworkers protested. Some months ago, a hundred of them were faced by police as they demonstrated at Wiese’s Lanzerac property in Stellenbosch. It was part of a series of of actions against him and other landowners in the Jonkershoek Valley, directed particularly against evictions of farmworkers from their houses.

President of Bawsi, Nosey Pieterse, said after the KWV meeting that his group could not be associated “with a director who does this to our workers”. You have to love that “our workers”! In fact there’s a whack of irony in Mr P speaking on behalf of the workers – with his MBA; with his recent KWV’s management record as industrial relations specialist rather obliterating his more distant trade union past; with his entrepreneurial present.

Bawsi was founded and dominated by black entrepreneurs and professionals eager to jog the wine industry along a particular BEE path and take a lucrative slice of the proceeds. It proved very useful to be able to claim – through building links with some worker and community organisations, mostly rather dubious ones –  to represent all the ‘previously disadvantaged’. When the SA Wine and Brandy Company was formed as the ‘inclusive and representative’ body of the wine industry, who should pop up to represent ‘labour’? – none other than Nosey P and Bawsi.

Incidentally, on the offchance your eyelids haven’t already irrevocably drooped, and  in case you eagerly observe the wine industry in its convulsive attempts to appear ‘new South African’ while fundamentally changing as little as possible – I should point out that Nosey Pieterse is not to be confused with Gavin Pieterse. As far as I know there’s no connection beyond the surname and the fact that both seem to be teflon-coated, clever and ambitious operators in ‘transformation’ who have long since ceased experiencing any crushing disadvantagedness. The Gavin version, by the way, once described our friend Christo as a “progressive person”.

So what’s new in such manoeuvres? Nothing, of course, except that it’s becoming increasingly accepted that ‘transformation’ doesn’t have much to do with changing the lives of the many –  those with weekly wages for long hours of work about the same as the cost of a pricy bottle of cabernet; with grim housing from which people like Mr Wiese can evict them. BEE in the wine industy is more and more firmly understood as meaning the enrichment of the few – who, soon, won’t even need to toss a few crumbs of comfort to those over whose backs they scramble upwards.