SEASONAL WORK IN THE CANNING FACTORY: “WE DIDN’T HAVE LUNCH HOURS, WE DIDN’T HAVE BREAKS, THERE WERE NO BENEFITS”

I was 14 years old when I started working as a seasonal worker. There was no mention of child labour at that time. You could start working at the age of ten. In those days the factory’s name was Premium, and it finally changed to Langeberg.

My mother had been working there for a while when I started in 1940. At the time that my mother started to work in the factory, the conditions were very, very bad because there was no union yet. My mother was just an ordinary worker and did not bother about things that were happening around her. When my mother came home, she would always tell us how bad the conditions in the factory were, the long hours, she’s tired, and she’s hungry. I always listened to her saying that there’s no sitting place, no cloakrooms and that they must eat their lunch out in the fields.

I worked at first in the cutting department but it was very tiring, because you had to stand the whole day. At that time, we didn’t have lunch hours, we didn’t have breaks, and there were no benefits. If they wanted to they could give you lunch-time; they could give you tea-time – but there was no law and no agreement with the workers. When it came to lunch-time you were at their mercy but nowadays lunch-time is compulsory. There were no cloakrooms. There was a big shed where they stored the fruit which workers had to use as a cloakroom. You did not get protective clothing either. There was no transport to take you to work or home. You had to walk home from work and the next morning you must walk from the house to the factory.

As a seasonal worker we worked with apricots and when they were finished we would be laid off for two to three weeks. Then; when the peaches came in they hired you again and laid you off again; the same for pears. So, food and canning workers were not covered by the Unemployment Insurance Act because you had to work continuously for thirteen weeks to be covered.

If you had a baby, or even if they saw you were pregnant then you’d get dismissed and they would not employ you again. Later we negotiated a confinement allowance but it was very little. You could stay at home two months before the baby and afterwards you could also stay two months. There was also no creche in the factory. Parents with small babies had to leave them in the shed until they could breastfeed them at lunchtime. People complained about the injustice and few benefits but they accepted it because they didn’t know how to deal with it and had no option because they had to earn wages.

The employers could pay you whatever they wanted to. There was day-work and piecework. When I started I earned 75c for day-work. When you did day-work, you normally started at 7.30 and finished at 5.45. Sometimes you started in the morning at 7 o’clock and worked right through to 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock in the evening. For piecework you got paid per box. To cut apricots you earned nine pence per box, and you know how many apricots can go into a box. But you gained more by doing piecework than day-work as a cutter, canner or in the label-room.

I worked in the factory for six years in all the different departments. Then they asked me to work as a supervisor in the canning department. If you were a canner you could pack trays (there were 12 cans on a tray) and you got paid a certain amount per tray. In the jam-room, where they boiled the can or jam, there were these big round rings that you had to take out and put on a tray. If there was no work in the canning department they put me in other departments, like the jam room to put syrup on the tins, or to the store, to label the tins, or to put tins in the cartons or transport.