This is not a review, but it will be a three part mini-series around the Steer Labour infringement issue that was making the rounds on social media this week. A viral video recorded at the Steers in Menlo Park, Pretoria showed employees (in their kitchen uniforms) doing gardening work outside the fast food restaurant, pulling weeds and trimming plants, instead of working in the kitchen. A bystander filmed an exchange where their companion confronted the store manager, arguing that this was “an abuse of workers” and not part of their normal job roles.

We are noticing reactions to the Steers Saga and its very telling of how South Africa will continue to struggle around inequality and exploitation, among other key issues. The dismissive reactions are not about gardening, they’re about distance from labour vulnerability, history, and consequence.

There’s a familiar response that surfaces whenever labour abuse is publicly named: “Why is this such a big deal?” It presents itself as common sense, even pragmatism. Gardening is “honest work”. Everyone should be willing to “help out”. People are “overreacting”. But in South Africa, that framing is never neutral. What’s being dismissed isn’t the act of pulling weeds at steers, it’s the significance of who is being asked to pull that weed, under what power conditions are they being asked to pull that weed and with what consequences if they refuse to pull that weed.

When people say “it’s honest work” or “what’s wrong with gardening?”, they’re drawing on a moral language that sounds universal but is actually historically loaded. In South Africa, these labour based phrases have long been used to, normalise role creep for Black workers, used as a means to justify unequal expectations,
and dismiss objections as entitlement or oversensitivity.

For people who have never had their labour boundaries stretched by power, “helping out” will always feel harmless. For people whose parents and grandparents were expected to do anything they were told because refusal had consequences, it lands very differently and this is what the privileged South Africans seem to willfully ignore.

For workers in precarious, low-wage jobs, flexibility is rarely optional. It is enforced by the quiet threat of fewer shifts, worse treatment, or replacement. The reason reactions split so sharply is not ideological sensitivity, it’s proximity. Those farthest from labour precarity tend to experience work as collaborative and voluntary. Those closest to it know that “just help out” often becomes a permanent expansion of responsibility without pay, protection, or dignity.

This is why the language of “honest work” rings hollow. It has historically been used to normalise boundary erosion for some workers, while others retain the right to say, “That’s not my role.” Calling this Steers Saga incident a big deal is not about fragility, it’s about recognising that small violations, when repeated and normalised, form the architecture of exploitation.

Many of the dismissive takes come from accounts whose lived experience is far removed from
casualised labour, replacement-level jobs,or workplaces where saying “that’s not my role” risks punishment. That distance often overlaps with race in South Africa not because of biology or morality, but because of history and structure.

And that architecture has a long memory in this country. One that is clearly dangerously different per demographic.