Some months ago, I sat opposite my editor-in-chief, swallowing back my tears before I couldn’t anymore.
It wasn’t the first time I had cried at work. I have, at various times throughout my career, nipped off to sob in a bathroom stall, or in the dark stillness of my car. But falling apart in my boss’s office is something I generally try to avoid.
The words that brought on the flood: “I feel like I’m not doing enough.”
My editor-in-chief wasn’t at fault for my tears. You see, I was weighing up the prospect of leaving journalism for good, escaping — as a number of our colleagues already have — to a sector where your every failing may no longer be in the full glare of the public. Over the years, this very important job of mine had started to feel impossible to excel at.
The last few days, we journalists have been confronted by the scale of our collective shortcomings. When tragedy hit in Johannesburg last week, journalists responded, although (as some correctly pointed out) it wasn’t always with the full strength of a well-fitted fourth estate.
Because newsrooms are not working as they ought to, politicians were not challenged and the public’s questions hung heavy in the air. With an election coming up and with multiple more crises on the horizon, the media’s struggle to fully rise to the occasion is stark.
As many will tell you, the media’s difficulties have come as business models struggle to adjust in the digital age of clickbait and soundbites. But the current problem, in South Africa at least, feels much bigger.
I’ve written before about the Covid-induced shift in the world’s labour markets — and its effect on how we view and perform our jobs.
In South Africa, our unemployment crisis went from bad to worse. According to the most recent quarterly labour force survey, the number of employed South Africans is still below what it was prior to the pandemic, which robbed the country of 2.3 million jobs. Despite retreating somewhat in recent quarters, the country’s official unemployment rate is still pushing 33%.
The situation is far more dire on closer inspection. Under the expanded definition, which counts job seekers who have given up on the search, the unemployment rate stands at just over 42%. South Africa also has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world.
With economic growth expected to remain low, at least in the medium-term, it could be years before we see a true reversal in South Africa’s unemployment predicament.
Though it is easy to be numb to the steady climb in our unemployment figures in the abstract, workers in offices around the country are feeling the effects of our changed labour market.
Last week, when one journalist sought to explain the type of pressure newsrooms, and especially young reporters, are under, the response from a number of commentators was to point out that the same was happening at their jobs.
Workforces have dwindled as companies seek to recover from the pandemic’s economic onslaught. Meanwhile, pressures have built from within. With staff more threadbare than ever, many are having to balance multiple jobs at once, leaving very little bandwidth for training new hires — some of whom are working their first jobs in a post-pandemic world.
Under these circumstances, retaining staff becomes a problem, as workers leave to seek greener pastures. Add to this the work-from-home phenomenon, which has completely altered how workers relate to their line managers, and you have a sometimes untenable situation on your hands. Especially in smaller companies, everyone — from the chief executive to the rookie — is under immense strain.
The pandemic’s effect on labour markets was different, depending on how a country’s government reacted to the economic crisis. More stimulus in the United States, for example, saw more people quitting their jobs, resulting in a tight labour market.
Importantly, the main thing that separates a tight labour market from a loose one, is where the power resides. Workers have more bargaining power in tighter labour markets, hence the US inflation spiral.
But as is the case with most things in South Africa, our labour market is marked by an internal unevenness. It is at once tight and slack.
The South African Reserve Bank pointed this out in its April monetary policy review.
At face value, the country’s ultra-high unemployment rate may suggest substantial slack in the labour market, the review said. “However, the duality of South Africa’s labour market is such that the market for high-skilled jobs has always been tight.”
This tightness ought to benefit workers, at least when it comes to wage increases, which the Reserve Bank contends have historically tended to be high.
But the current economic conditions could see this trend change: “Despite a recovery in nominal wages post-pandemic, real wages have, on average, declined, as has happened globally. South African firms are facing a challenging operating environment, compounded by load-shedding and efforts to mitigate its impacts, and hence would likely be less inclined to accommodate large real wage increases.”
Again, the likelihood is that smaller companies that are more exposed to economic headwinds bear the brunt of this dilemma — wanting to hold on to their most capable workers, but not being able to grant them much-needed salary increases — as bigger firms resort to the “labour hoarding” that tends to characterise tight labour markets.
And as conditions deteriorate, the smaller certain companies risk becoming. In other words, South Africa’s labour market faces the prospect of becoming even more lopsided.
What the pandemic’s aftermath has exposed is that certain underlying structural problems are driving companies, and the people who work for them, closer towards the brink.
At the risk of broadening my argument too far, these structural problems are just as much the result of bad economic policy as they are woeful governance. When that blunts our ability to do our work — and when those jobs entail holding the people at fault to account — we are in big trouble.