Following a strike by some union members, regular manufacturing has resumed at a processing facility operated by Rainbow Hen, one in every of South Africa’s main poultry corporations.
Earlier this week, an settlement was reached between firm and union on the Rainbow Hen processing plant at Hammarsdale in KwaZulu-Natal, and employees have returned to work.
On December 6, a strike was known as by members of the Agriculture, Meals and Allied Democratic Employees Union (AFADWU), reported GroundUp. The union had justified the motion by alleging that Rainbow Hen had unlawfully terminated their rights by refusing to acknowledge its workers as members of the AFADWU.
Discussions between the corporate and the union resulted in a settlement on December 11. The strike was known as off, and the workers affected returned to work.
In accordance with the corporate, AFADWU had demanded rights of recognition and group on the plant, regardless of not assembly the required minimal threshold.
In a press release, Rainbow Hen acknowledged it already had a recognition settlement with two different unions. It added that manufacturing volumes have been maintained throughout the strike.
Extra on Rainbow Hen
In 1960, Rainbow was based by Stanley Methven when he started promoting birds reared on his father’s farm from a stall in Durban, in keeping with the corporate’s website online. As demand for the chickens grew, the agency’s first processing plant was commissioned in Hammarsdale in 1963.
Now a separate entity inside RCL Meals, Rainbow is a vertically built-in broiler producer. It breeds and rears its personal birds, and produced feed at its Epol feed mills, in addition to processing, distributing and advertising contemporary, frozen, additional processed and value-added rooster merchandise.
For the final monetary yr ended June of 2023, RCL Meals reported complete group gross sales income of 37.8 billion rand (ZAR; US$2.06 billion). Regardless of a year-on-year improve of 17.3% in income, working revenue — expressed as Earnings Earlier than Curiosity, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA) — was 24.5% decrease than the earlier corresponding interval at ZAR1.71 billion.
CEO Paul Cruikshank described the yr as among the many hardest the South African enterprise had confronted. In addition to document ranges of load-shedding (energy provide disruption), he highlighted the primary challenges of rising inflation, municipal service supply failures, and rising unemployment.
RCL Meals operates in a variety of agri-food sectors. Its Worth-Added Enterprise delivered income of greater than ZAR24.5 billion by its Groceries, Baking, and Sugar enterprise items. The latter consists of molasses-based Molatek Animal Feeds.
In 2021, RCL Meals separated its Rainbow enterprise from the Worth-Added Enterprise, and Rainbow now operates as a largely impartial entity.
With round 6,500 workers within the final monetary yr, Rainbow generated income of ZAR13.6 billion. Essential merchandise are rooster, and Epol and Driehoek animal feeds. Within the final monetary yr, output included 328,000 metric tons of rooster merchandise, and 1.3 million metric tons of animal feeds.
Current developments in Rainbow’s enterprise
In August of 2023, RCL Meals offered its stake in HMH Rainbow Ltd in Uganda.
On the finish of September, Rainbow introduced that its enterprise had been impacted by the outbreak of extremely pathogenic avian influenza that had been impacting South Africa’s business layer and broiler farms. At that time, the outbreak had affected 11 of the corporate’s 19 websites in the Inland area, which is one in every of three areas the place Rainbow operates.
As much as that date, round 410,000 of the agency’s birds had been culled, and the monetary price was estimated at ZAR115 million.
With annual slaughtering of 197 million birds, Rainbow is the second largest poultry firm in Africa, in keeping with the WATTPoultry.com’s High Poultry Corporations survey.
