Cape Town - After a 90 minute hearing, the Constitutional Court has reserved judgment in a case involving 173 fruit farm workers who went on strike to challenge their apartheid-era single-sex hostel housing and living conditions at the Oak Valley Estate in Grabouw.
The journey to the Constitutional Court began in May 2019, when 173 Oak Valley Estate employees, organised by the Commercial, Stevedoring, Agriculture and Allied Workers Union, CSAAWU, went on strike.
The CSAAWU is a trade union that organises farm workers in the Western Cape.
The strike was against what they saw as racial discrimination in Oak Valley’s employment practices and the payment of wages on which it was not possible to lead a dignified life.
The strikers claimed Oak Valley was behaving unlawfully by failing to provide humane living conditions for black African workers and their families.
CSAAWU argued that all the workers were from the Eastern Cape and housed in male-only hostels, where they live in single rooms with up to four people in a room and that they are allegedly not allowed to bring their families to live with them.
It was when the strike “triggered incidents of intimidation, damage to property, and interference with Oak Valley’s business operations, as well as breaches of the picketing rules determined by the CCMA,” that Oak Valley Estate went to the Labour Court seeking an interdict against CSAAWU and 173 employees.
The order was granted, but on appeal, the Labour Appeal Court refused to uphold parts of the Labour Court’s order that had the effect of evicting striking employees who reside on Oak Valley’s property.
It also concluded that the Labour Court did not have jurisdiction over alleged breaches of the picketing rules by the CCMA and consequently set aside portions of the Labour Court’s order dealing with non-compliance with the picketing rules.
The Labour Appeal Court upheld the remainder of the interdict against the CSAAWU and the 173 workers because Oak Valley was “able to name certain individuals who participated in what it considered to be unlawful acts together with a further group of unnamed but clearly unidentifiable individuals,” during the strike.
Appearing for the workers and the CSAAWU at the Constitutional Court, advocate Irene De Vos argued that the effect of the Labour Court and Labour Appeal Court judgments is that “an interdict can be issued against a person who merely participated in a protected strike or a lawful protest during which others committed some unlawful conduct.”
One of the Constitutional Court judges, Judge Zukisa Tshiqi, pointed out that the strike and the interdict happened in 2019 and asked De Vos why she had brought the matter to the Constitutional Court and whether the whole thing was not just an academic exercise.
De Vos said: “This is an interdict which applies ad infinitum with no limit to the strike, and this means the impact on these particular workers extends even after the strike has been called off.”
De Vos argued that the Labour Appeal Court applied the incorrect test for establishing whether the final interdict ought to have been granted against the employees who remained on strike while others returned to work.
De Vos said that the papers and the findings of the Labour Court and Labour Appeal Court do not establish a factual link between the applicants and the conduct they were interdicted and restrained from committing.
Oak Valley did not oppose the appeal and did not file opposing papers.