Cheap bulk wine forcing South African vineyard workers' wages down

The low price of bulk wine around the world is a large contributing factor towards the pitiful wages paid to South African vineyard workers, according to the country’s most eminent wine expert and leading wine writer Michael Fridjhon.  

More than half of all South African wine retails for R40 per bottle of less in South Africa, he points out in an article for the Daily Maverick, and the dry goods and excise duty accounts for half of that, and transport and retailers’ margins half of what remains.  

“It’s not difficult to work out how much the vineyard and cellar workers are earning to keep up the flow of cheap wine,” said Fridjhon, adding that the majority of grape farmers are selling their grapes for less than the actual cost of farming it.  

“In fact, it’s a safe bet that except for mechanically farmed high yielding vineyards there isn’t the money to pay the workers a living wage, or to provide good enough housing that the subsidy of a roof over the head of the worker and his family is compensation enough for going to bed hungry at night.”  

And the grape growers who have to meet the price points forced on them by the major international buyers only earn a fraction of what their customers do.  

“It’s estimated that Systembolaget – the Swedish monopoly – banks 25 times more per litre than the grape grower whose fruit has ended up in the bottle on the monopoly’s shelf,” claimed Fridjhon.  

To mitigate the problem he said that the international wine trade could reinvest some of its profits in training programmes, enabling workers to upgrade their skills so they are not simply doing work which will in a matter of time be taken over by mechanisation.  

“The wine industry shares an obligation to practice its business in an ethical way,” he continued, while consumers have an equal obligation to support those who do it and withdraw support from those who don’t.  

Some supermarkets in Denmark have removed South African wines off their shelves in protest at the working conditions of farm workers in South Africa as revealed in a recent documentary.   The short film also included the destitute livelihood farm workers in South Africa are exposed to.  

Bitter Grapes - Slavery in the Vineyards was produced by Danish filmmaker Tom Heinemann and was broadcast in Denmark and Sweden this past week.