Amplifying invisibility: COVID‐19 and Zimbabwean migrant farm workers in South Africa

Abstract

How does the COVID‐19 pandemic impact migrant worker visibility? This paper examines how the pandemic underscores the invisibility of Zimbabwean migrant farm workers employed at ZZ2, one of the largest commercial farms in South Africa. I argue that Zimbabweans are made invisible in three ways. First, employer and state restrictions on mobility, alongside rising xenophobia in South Africa, leave migrant workers hyper‐visible to ZZ2 management, yet invisible to most people outside the farm. Second, ZZ2 avoids discussion of its migrant workforce in public forums, even as it faces increased scrutiny for its treatment of its workers during the pandemic. Third, the most prominent critic of ZZ2—the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)—grants migrant workers only a partial visibility as undifferentiated foreigners with no voice, a construction that ultimately maintains their invisibility at the company. Taken together, these interlocking forms of invisibilization diminish the structural and associational power of workers.

Migrant farmworkers: Resisting and organising before, during and after COVID‐19

“…The pre-existing conditions characterising the political economy of agriculture shaped forms of control and exploitation during the pandemic, such as the mechanisms and intensity of the violence experienced in the countries of departure and arrival (Addison, 2023;Corrado & Palumbo, 2022;Keegan, 2023;Ramsaroop, 2023;Stead, 2023), the racialised and gendered exploitation experienced along the journey and in the farms and fields (Duenas et al, 2019;Madrigal, 2023;Ramsaroop, 2023;Stead, 2023), the opening or foreclosing of spaces and forms of organisation and resistance (Cohen & Hjalmarson, 2020;Madrigal, 2023;Ramsaroop, 2023) and the role of the capitalist state in reproducing subordination and conditions of visibility/invisibility (Addison, 2023;Cheng & Zani, 2023;Duenas et al, 2019;Ramsaroop, 2023;Rotz, 2017).…”

“…Imaginaries based on the ‘othering’ of migrant workers and state‐corporate processes that create an isolated, exploitable community are fundamental to the reproduction of the migrant labour system as invisible and undesired, including in emerging economies of the Global South. Addison's (2023) article introduces the readers to the selective and manifold invisibilities that define the life of Zimbabwean workers in the largest tomato farm of the Southern Hemisphere, located in Polokwane, South Africa. Through a combination of earlier fieldwork, recent interactions with workers and publicly available literature, Addison engages with the COVID‐19 pandemic as an intensifier of previous dynamics and as a heuristic moment that sheds light on the internal contradictions and strategic silences of all actors involved: states, large‐scale agricultural employers and a national South African workers' movement.…”

“…Agricultural guest worker programmes now exist across continents in countries with vastly different political economies (Martin, 2016). The contributions within this symposium span the United States (Keegan, 2023;Madrigal, 2023) with its large undocumented and indigenous Latin American migrant farm-worker population working alongside employer-driven H-2A visa holders; Canada with its archetypical foreign worker programme for seasonal agricultural workers that combines bilateral agreements and employer-driven programmes (Ramsaroop, 2023); Australia and its scheme for Pacific Islander labour in horticulture (Stead, 2023); the less-discussed South Africa (Addison, 2023), which is a sending and receiving country for migrant farm labour; and Taiwan, with South-east Asian farm workers employed irregularly under a very new limited system (Cheng & Zani, 2023). Although not comprehensive, the geographical and socio-economic diversity of the case studies, mixed with the multi-disciplinarity of the approaches, provide the readers with tools and frameworks of analysis that could be adapted to other contexts and places, including European countries with their high dependence on both temporary working schemes and informal labour and Latin American and Central American countries as territories of agricultural production and workers' circulation.…”