Sunday Tribune reports that one of SA’s biggest chicken producers is selling 15 of its 25 farms in Hammarsdale to stay afloat after fighting years of dumping by importers.
Rainbow Chicken, renamed RCL Foods, is retrenching 1,350 workers from the end of the month. MD Scott Pitman said he no longer knew what to do to save jobs. According to him the government was doing nothing to tighten import controls on frozen chicken, and the EU and Brazil, especially, were capitalising on this with large-scale dumping. Mike’s Chickens (Limpopo), a family-run business in Polokwane for 38 years, has already closed, putting more than 1,000 people out of work. Country Bird (Free State and North West) is retrenching 1,500 workers. Katishi Masemola of the Food and Allied Workers’ Union (Fawu) warned that if the government did not step in to hikes import tariffs on chicken, members would embark on rolling mass action. He also said the union’s fight was not with the chicken companies they were the victims.
- Read this report by Mervyn Naidoo at Sunday Tribune
- Read too, Counting the cost of cutting jobs, at Sunday Tribune
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page