Johannesburg - Ceres Fruit Growers, one of South Africa’s biggest packing and storage companies for apples and pears, is depleting stocks as a pay strike by members curbs operations.
While the company has managed to meet orders and to export items in cold storage, this “will no longer be possible in due course as stocks are running low”, Managing Director Francois Malan said in an emailed response to questions on Thursday. “All aspects of the business are now impacted upon by this strike. Ceres’s brands include Tru-Cape apples and pears.
Members of the Food and Allied Workers Union (Fawu) at the company have been on strike since the start of September, demanding a 12.5 percent increase in pay. Fawu has said it could settle for a lower raise if its members get a share of profit. The annual inflation rate in South Africa, where one in every four people is unemployed, was 4.6 percent in August.
Half of Ceres’s 800 employees are Fawu members, Malan said. Unionised workers staged a march on Wednesday in the Ceres municipality, about 140km from Cape Town, to hand over a memorandum of demands, he said in a separate email.
The union’s demands equate to a 9 percent increase and a R1 000 annual profit share per person, spokeswoman Dominique Martin said by email. Employees earn a minimum of R896 weekly, she said.
While the producer can’t yet quantify the losses as a result of the strike, the damage to property “already amounts to millions of rands,” the company said in a statement.
BLOOMBERG