Equal pay and the bard of Keiskamma

By Jasper Cook

Half a century ago, in a horseshoe bend on the Keiskamma River, there was a successful citrus export farm. Its packing shed was designed and built by hand from the ground up by a man I knew as Willie. I never knew him well enough to know whether he had been to school. The first day I met him, he repaired a tractor and then drove off on it, wearing his main hat as a tractor driver. Later on, he donned other hats, like engineer, architect, designer, builder, electrician, mechanic, fencer and maybe more.

The farm prospered. Willie’s value was reflected in his wage. He was paid more than the less skilled workers he lived and worked among. As far as the paymaster knew, it was understood and accepted that he earned more. For years, when the farmer drove home from the packing shed at knock-off time on payday, the entire workforce — some 50 or 60 workers — would be gathered outside the packing shed. But the gathering was peaceful, so he just noted it and drove on.

After about two decades, his curiosity got the better of him. He parked his car, approached the gathering, and asked if he might stay and observe. He and his family were fluent in isiXhosa. Any Xhosa first-language speaker hearing any of his kith and kin talking out of sight behind a wall would be dumbstruck to go around it and discover pale skins among them. The farmer was allowed to attend, but there might have been conditions. I don’t recall. I imagine that a condition would be silence, or at least that he should not interfere. At that time, my mother was doing a stint on the farm as packing shed administrator, and the farmer, her brother, shared the story with her. Siblings often feel safe to share things perhaps less credible to others.

It turned out that, during all those years, this gathering had taken the same simple form: all the wage packets were opened and emptied into a disc ploughshare. The money was totalled up and then divided equally, so that every single person in the gathering, the entire workforce, received the exact-same wage.

Willie, the engineer and master of many trades, got the same as the youngest, most inexperienced teenage fruit-picker. I still wonder if this was a male-only workforce. After all, girls and women getting equal pay in the first world is a stretch, even in 2024, so that would be all the more remarkable.

The farmer drove home in shock. This was a man who had spent years of his young life ‘running away from Rommel’, as he described his early years in World War Two, near Tobruk in Libya. Then, along with about 10 000 other South Africans, he spent much more of it in Italian and German POW camps. I can’t believe he was easily astonished.

When telling my mother the story, he explained that it was not so much the outcome of the meeting that had silenced him. His surprise was that he had never had the slightest notion, in all those years, what the meeting was about. A worker explained to him: “The fruit-picker works, the foreman works. We all work. Work is just work. So we all get the same.”

Sharing money equally among all is not especially surprising among musicians. It was once common practice: not so much any more, but this account of it on a farm is the first I’ve ever come across outside of music. Anyone who has hours to waste can simply google ‘equal pay’ to see how much ink is spent (wasted?) on the notion of equal pay, and here I am adding to the pile.

With the recent news that South African-born Elon Musk earns more than our entire GDP, it is tempting to look at another ‘fact’. US Senator Bernie Sanders points out that the ‘bottom half of the American population earns less than the top one percent’. This is disturbing enough, but it’s actually far worse than that.

The notion of ‘percent’ was hard for my workers to grasp when I was farming. It took me time to realise that its meaning is built into English, from Latin. English-speakers can easily guess that a Roman ‘centurion’ commanded a century, meaning one hundred soldiers. With one percent simply meaning ‘one in a hundred’, we can be forgiven for thinking that one in a hundred Americans are billionaires, but that is not true. It’s about the wealth they own in total, not how many there are of them. In fact, not even close to one person in every hundred is a billionaire. They are rarer than that.

Out of 330 million people in the US, 801 are billionaires. That is closer to one in 100 000 people. This doesn’t make me feel better, because South Africa has seven billionaires in our population of 60 million. That is close to one in 10 000. So we have more billionaires than we should, compared to the US; we are worse at sharing (not to say more greedy) than the US. That’s a shock.

Look at the thing in plain sight. Wearing my farmer’s hat, 99 people out of 100 makes us a monoculture. This is dangerous: monocultures seed their own destruction and die. So, are we, the 99 percent, doomed? I doubt it. Without us, who is going to buy stuff?

Do you think you’ve seen a strike? You ain’t seen nothing yet! Once we realise we 99 percent are the working class, there will be the mutha of all strikes. I am talking about professionals and skilled workers striking. I mean everybody. Everything will change, but we will still be needed. Our replacement Optimus robots don’t eat, but CEOs do. They will absolutely not grow, slaughter or prepare it themselves.

Once, in my steam days, I mentioned the word ‘millionaire’ to an engine driver. He stood, raised his hand high above his head, and said: ‘Miljoenêr? Jislaaik. Dis ‘n ontsaglike groot hoop kontant.’

So, this is an ontsaglike groot ding waiting to hit the fan. Regardless of what brings about change, I feel really sorry for billionaires. They have a lot, but a lot of it is dead and doing nothing, and it follows that they also have a lot to lose. You may think they can afford to lose a lot of what they own, and come out unscathed, but it doesn’t always work that way. Every businessman I’ve met says ‘there is no standing still’. You are either going somewhere, or you are standing still: the monetary equivalent of standing still is ‘belly up’.

When the activist US Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was challenged to find the money for the ‘green new deal’, she famously said, ‘We are paying for it already.’ Recession lawyers and accountants will be two-a-penny. Billionaires are soon to discover a host of things that they cannot afford NOT to do.

In a recent BizNews clip, a wealthy business activist sang the virtues of capitalism. To date, not he nor anybody has cited a capitalist system anywhere that adequately looks after the sick and old, but he personally came across as kindly, boyish and charming.

I hope he hangs onto all his money. If not, he can comfort himself with the words of that poetic Keiskammahoek worker:

The fruit picker works.
The foreman works.
We all work.
Work is just work.
We all get the same.

FEATURED IMAGE:  “The Keiskamma Altarpiece,” produced by 130 women at the Keiskamma Trust in the village of Hamburg, at the mouth of the Keiskamma River. The four metre-high, four metre-wide piece reveals the struggles that elderly women endured when the youth in their community were hit by HIV two decades ago, and grandparents stepped in to care for children. Among others, it toured the United States in 2007. Image: Anthea Pokroy/Keiskamma Trust. To read more about the Keiskamma Trust, click here.