Spur is making a mistake by not listening to boycotters: Solidarity head
Solidarity head, Dirk Hermann has tried to set the record straight regarding reports that the union was endorsing or leading a boycott against Spur restaurants, saying that he was simply voicing the ‘unheard’ views of Spur customers.
The controversy surrounds an incident that took place at a Spur restaurant in the south of Johannesburg, where, after two customers’ children got into a tussle, they got into a shouting match.
The alteration, between a white male and a black female, resulted in the white male being banned from Spur, which infuriated some white members of the community, who retaliated by boycotting the restaurant.
According to Spur, the boycott impacted only a small minority of restaurants, but was big enough to cost franchisees millions of rands in revenue, leading to head company needing to step in to support them.
Tensions over the issue were amplified when Hermann, writing in his personal capacity, penned an open letter to Spur, saying that he was one of the people who was left with a negative impression by Spur’s handling of the incident.
Spur’s CEO, Pierre van Tonder, said in response that he was ‘gobsmacked’ that someone representing a union like Solidarity – whose members worked at Spur branches that were affected by the boycott – would support such a thing.
Speaking about the boycott, Spur said it believed that many who were buying into it had been misled, and that the whole incident was being played out as a political statement rather than on the basis of fact.
“People haven’t looked at the footage properly,” van Tonder said. “Especially when a man grabs a child and pulls him across the table… it’s not acceptable.”
Footage released by Spur on the incident showed that in the altercation, the white man grabbed the black woman’s child. In the viral video, it was shown that he also got aggressive, shaking the family’s table, and threatening to punch the woman.
According to Solidarity’s Hermann, he is not advocating the boycott on Spur, but merely expressing what those who are leading it feel.
Hermann said that white patrons feel that Spur was “choosing sides”.
“Solidarity never said that we want to organise a boycott. I just wrote an open letter where I actually interpret the feeling I hear on social media, we are simply saying ‘Spur be careful, you are in the process of estranging a very big part of your client base’.”
“The way that the people experienced that period is that Spur took a specific side,” he said. “The mistake that Spur then made was not to deal with that specific feeling, what they then did was to say to them ‘you are a bunch of racists’.”
Read: Spur boycott affecting a minority of our branches – CEO
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