South African Diary Company Clover Get Worldwide Support Over Worker Rights Pleas

South Africa – Dairy company, Clover employees are up and arms against worker disparity. To the tune of 5000 of them have been protesting against low wages and were supported by the organizing of a National and International Day of Action.

The workers were supported unitedly by the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) and its affiliates, the Food and Allied Workers Union (Fawu) and the General Industries Workers Unions of South Africa (Giwusa) together with other trade unions and organisations nationally and internationally.

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Clover staffers have been protesting for a long time. They have now garnered support from union groups where they were supported by protest action in at least six parts of South Africa, as well as nine other locations, amplifying the effect of their demands for decent working conditions and an end to factory closures, employee exploitation and slashing of jobs.

The strike action also aimed to gain justice for employees adversely affected by the takeover of Clover by Israeli company, Milco. Workers have been protesting of the kind of profit that the company has been recording at the expense of low wages that they have been getting. Milco SA, a consortium led by Israel’s Central Bottling Company, purchased a majority stake in highly profitable Clover in 2019. Despite the workers’ objection to this, based on solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli imperialism, the South African state authorities approved the merger on the basis of “creating jobs” as part of the so called Masakhane project. 

Those jobs never came. In fact, more were retrenched. With Project Sencillo in the picture, even 2000 more jobs were lost.

Worldwide, there is a movement going on to boycott Clover products all together.