"‘Like slaves’: Zimbabwe farmworkers lash out at work conditions", 21 February 2023

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Zimbabwe’s agriculture sector remains the largest employer of labour in the country but the official minimum wage for farm labourers is about 78,000 Zimbabwean dollars (approximately $70) per month. With the annual inflation rate now at about 180 percent in a country where more than half of the workforce is in the informal sector, low-paying, labour-intensive jobs are still very appealing...

Within Zimbabwe, many farm labourers live in colonial-era shacks commonly known as “makomboni”.

Munatsi lives in one, sharing two rooms with his wife and four children. Some of his peers have to make do with living in renovated pigsties, tobacco barns, and horse stables on farms where they work.

Al Jazeera spoke to almost a dozen labourers but most chose to speak anonymously for fear of reprisals from their bosses.

...many said they struggle to provide even the basics for their family, routinely owing their bosses and money lenders, a pattern that has led to many farm labourers being forced to stick to their underpaying jobs for many years...

Since the days of colonial rule...a talking point in Zimbabwe’s agriculture-dominated economy has been the exploitation of illiterate Black farm labourers by their white settler farmer bosses...

When Zimbabwe finally got independence in 1980...Robert Mugabe...adopted a globally applauded reconciliation policy with white farmers.

This left mostly white commercial farmers in full control of the majority of the country’s prime farmland, but there was no change of fortunes for farm labourers.

“Independence brought no immediate change to the mindset of white commercial farmers and their treatment of Black farm labourers,” Hamandishe Maponga, who worked for different white farmers before and after independence, told Al Jazeera...

By the early 2000s’, veterans of the liberation war started occupying and taking over white-owned farms...Black farm labourers found themselves working for new bosses, this time Black, but again working conditions barely changed.

This controversial occupation of Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms was accompanied by sanctions from Western countries...this further worsened the plight of most farm workers...

Cases of workers complaining about low or unpaid wages have lingered for years in the understaffed but overwhelmed labour courts...

“It’s a pity that the slave-like treatment of farm labourers is one of those colonial legacies that many African countries have normalised,” he added.

These poor working conditions have been allowed to go on by barely enforced labour laws, industry insiders and trade unionists say.

“Many farms in Zimbabwe are owned by members of parliament, politicians and other influential professionals whose interests as farm owners often conflicted with their other roles,” Michael  Kandukutu, head of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZTCTU), told Al Jazeera...

Lack of subsidies and poor management skills by farmers coupled with problems like unreliable water and power supply, and poor infrastructure like roads have also increased farming costs.

“The government might regulate minimum wage for farm labourers but most farmers are either unable or unwilling to pay this wage,” Prosper Chitambabra, an economist at The Labour Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe, told Al Jazeera. “Most farm labourers are struggling because they earn well below the poverty datum line and far below the average minimum wage.”

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“I have been here for more than eight years but I have no pension fund, no leave days, no written contract, or medical insurance,” Munatsi said. “If you subject your worker to such conditions, you are a slave master, not an employer.”