ABSTRACT
This study examines labour organisation in South Africa's fruit and wine industries. It is argued that the economic and political pressures emanating from the sectors' insertion in export markets is the main reason behind the transformation of the labour regime from a low-wage paternalism to a variety of arrangements, including neo-paternalism, formal collective bargaining and corporatist equity-sharing and decision making. While the first cannot hold, it is not clear which of the latter two regimes is set to become the dominant future pattern. That, it would seem, depends mainly on the responses of white farmers to growing worker demand for the sharing of economic and political power.
