About 50 members of the Food and Allied Workers Union picketed outside the Labour Court on Tuesday. They had applied to interdict South African Breweries (SAB) from retrenching workers.
The Labour Court in Johannesburg has dismissed an urgent application by members of the Food and Allied Workers’ Union (FAWU) for an interdict stopping retrenchments at South African Breweries (SAB).
On Tuesday, about 50 members wearing red union t-shirts and carrying placards picketed outside the court where the matter was heard.
This follows the company’s decision to retrench 233 employees.
FAWU wanted the court to compel SAB to follow “fair procedure” in the retrenchment of workers already in progress at its local brewery. They also wanted the court to interdict SAB and its parent company AB InBev from instituting future dismissals.
In a statement, FAWU said, “Displacing workers into the ranks of more than 13-million unemployed citizens in South Africa is unacceptable. Our country already faces a high unemployment rate, and companies cannot casually discard workers into the abyss of poverty.”
FAWU Gauteng chairperson William Mokgase told GroundUp that workers had faced continuous retrenchments since 2020.
“In 2020, SAB retrenched 330 workers, in 2021 about 60, in 2022 around 150, and in 2023 another 70. Last year they cut more than 100 jobs, and now 233 more jobs are on the line,” he said. “If we fail to defend these jobs, they will come for everyone.”
Mokgase accused SAB of replacing permanent workers with workers contracted through labour brokers. “They have the audacity to retrench workers and rehire them under brokers. This is turning decent jobs into cheap labour which is why we came to court on an urgent basis,” he said.
SAB had not responded to our questions by the time of publication.
FAWU’s lawyer, Anton Roskam, argued in court that the retrenchments amounted to unfair labour practices and warned that families would suffer as a result.
SAB’s lawyers argued that the restructuring formed part of efficiency measures being implemented at the company.
Judge Molatelo Robert Makhura struck the matter off the urgent roll and advised the union to resubmit its application.
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.
The life of an activist in South Africa is often fraught with danger, as they stand up against corruption and injustice.
Hidden Tree
Fun South African Fact: South Africa is full of record-breaking animals.
The Dude
Now Now – immediately / soon. A confusing phrase for non-locals meaning sometime soon – sooner than just now but quicker than right now.Example: “We’re going to the beach now now!” (But first we have to pack our swimming gear, stop at gas station and maybe get some snacks…).