Publication

This paper raises critical questions about the implementation of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) in the South African wine industry. It argues that far from representing a decisive break with the past, BEE is continuous with it, and allows the industry to avoid potentially more uncomfortable options to redress current and past race-based imbalances. The authors state that BEE has been used to displace the transformation agenda, away from addressing the conditions faced by workers, to an ameliorist agenda that allows small cohorts of black entrepreneurs to inherit the cloak of the preferred beneficiary of transformation in the wine industry.