26/09/2025
Publication: SWF
Author: SWF Press Writer
Australian giant Brambles is paying slavery wages to its workers in South Africa; breaking South African labour laws
Simunye Workers Forum and community members will have a demonstration at the High Commission of Australia in solidarity with striking Chep workers at Jet Park.
Chep is owned by an Australian company called Brambles.
Date: Thursday, 28 August 2025
Venue: 292 Orient Street, Arcadia, Pretoria, South Africa
Time: 10:00 am
For more information, call Simunye Workers Forum on +27 62 047 2668 or +27 82 8121934. Please email this address if you need photos of the protest emailed to you tomorrow.
Why the striking workers are protesting:
The Australian supply chain and logistics company, Brambles, has been embroiled in a strike since 21 August 2025 over the poor behaviour of it’s South African pallet and container-making subsidiary, CHEP SA. Nearly all the workers at CHEP SA’s Jet Park warehouse, in South Africa’s industrial heartland in Gauteng, went on a protected strike from 21 August after the Brambles subsidiary refused to increase their wages and breached the South African labour law by refusing to make long-standing workers permanent.
Some of the striking workers are paid as little as R9000 (AUS$787) per month before tax, and spend more than half their meagre pay cheque on public transport to get to work and back.
This starkly contrasts with the earnings of the Brambles top dogs - Scott Perkins, the Non-Executive Director until last year, was the third highest paid Australian director until he retired in August 2024, raking in AUS$1.72 million per year in board fees. The Brambles CEO, Graham Chipchase, earns AUS$9 million per year.
This is 957 times the salary of the lowly paid workers at CHEP SA’s Jet Park warehouse!
Brambles is also breaching South African labour laws. Since 2015, the labour laws have said that client companies must make labour broker workers permanent after three months on the job.
CHEP SA has refused to do this – some workers have been working there for 18 years and are still casual labourers.
The company is very brazen about this and describes the labour broker it continues to use, C-Force, as a “service provider”, and not a labour broker. Yet C-Force clearly describes itself as a labour broker on its website (https://www.c-force.co.za/).
The South African labour law in any case does not even allow “service providers” to “provide” workers to a client company for longer than three months anyway – the same rules apply to these companies.
The CHEP SA Jet Park workers are aware that this company has caused numerous other strikes globally. These include the two-month CHEP strike in New Zealand in 2022 (after the company insisted that it would not pay the workers a cent more than the national minimum wage there), and the CHEP strike in the UK from December 2021 to April 2022.
South African workers do not need an exploitative Australian company working poor Black working class workers to the bone while the Australian executives siphon off the money to live luxurious lifestyles back home on land stolen from Indigenous Australians.