NALSU Labour Studies Webinar: Thursday, 21 October 2021, Kanyiso Ntikinca Rhodes University, “Labour in Global Value Chains: Apples in South African agriculture"

NEIL AGGETT LABOUR STUDIES UNIT (NALSU) Labour Studies Seminar Series, Rhodes University, South Africa.

WEBINAR: Thursday (not Wednesday), 21 October 2021, online via Zoom (details below), 4 pm

TOPIC & SPEAKER: Kanyiso Ntikinca Rhodes University, “Labour in Global Value Chains: Apples in South African agriculture"

Apples are one of South Africa's leading exports and the country is the 3rd largest apple exporter in the southern hemisphere. The local industry directly employs over 27,000 workers, supporting almost 110,000 dependents. Before 1995, the local apple value chain was producer-driven, with extensive state support facilitating its growth, and its bargaining position in global markets. Further, farmworkers were largely excluded from labour law and union rights. From 1995, however, it became buyer-driven, with the ANC's removal of subsidies and northern supermarkets' new hegemony over global agri-food value chains. New labour laws placed additional pressure on commercial farmers. This talk examines the transition in South Africa's apple value chain, and how it fosters growing precarity for farmworkers. It draws on original research in the Langkloof Valley in Kou-kamma Municipality, the Eastern Cape's biggest apple producer and exporter. 

SPEAKER: Kanyiso Ntikinca is Lecturer in Sociology, Rhodes University, and an active member of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU). He specialises in the sociologies of work, labour markets and global value chains, and coordinates 3rd year Industrial and Economic Sociology. He is currently completing a PhD dissertation on farm workers in the Langkloof Valley, a deciduous fruit producing region in the Eastern Cape. He is involved with ECARP, an NGO that supports farmworkers, farm-dwellers and small-scale farmers across the Cacadu and Amathole municipal districts in the Eastern Cape. 

JOINING: register in advance for the seminar, which will use Zoom, by going to:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwvc-muqjgjGNJFENsg1YdLxxM9wxIQg1Pp

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

HOSTS: The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and Economics & Economic History, Rhodes University and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES).

NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Economics, History and Sociology,  it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.