Unemployment has become a human crisis told in cold statistics. The official unemployment rate was 29,4% in February last year. In reality, it was about 40% — the official figure leaves out people too demoralised to get on another taxi, or make another call from the local tickey-box.
A human crisis is better told in human numbers. In 1995 1,9-million people were without jobs. Last year their number had ballooned to 4,9-million (officially) and 8,1-million (unofficially).
If all it does is put joblessness at centre-stage, tomorrow’s Growth and Development Summit will have served a purpose. From the mid-1990s, external events and domestic policy decisions have seen the attrition of the working classes.
The clothing, textile and shoe-manufacturing industries went to the wall, with towns and the factories that dot KwaZulu-Natal throttled by imports flooding from the East as tariff barriers came tumbling down. The secure, waged employment of yesteryear vanished as South Africa took its place in the global economy.
Mining, the bedrock of the economy and once the generator of 41% of our exports, tottered under the weakening gold price. Forced to restructure and modernise to maintain profitability, some mines also reached the end of their working lives. About 230 000 miners reached the end of theirs. This is one man’s story.
A miner’s tale
Simon Rapopo has spent nearly every day of the past four years waiting outside a tumbledown fence surrounding the Savuka mine in Carletonville. For 10 years he worked on this mine, often in areas so cramped that he had to work on his knees. He now walks with a cane.
His eyes are dull as he recalls the day he was retrenched in 1999. ”When suffering knocked at my door four years ago, I told him there is no seat for him. But he told me not to worry because he has brought his own stool,” says Rapopo.
He believes his only chance of re-employment is to wait at the fence for a chance to do what he knows best.
”I tried to get work in Carletonville but everyone rejected me. They told me I have skills, but only to work on the mines. Now I spend every day here watching the miners through [the] fence. If I go inside the guard tells me I don’t belong here.”
The hundreds of thousands of Simon Rapopos pose the great challenge. They are the detritus belched into rural areas by economic restructuring, unskilled for anything but a life spent hewing the rock.
They’re not alone. There are 2,5 secondary industry jobs lost for every miner retrenched, though the figure may be higher. A recent study at Richards Bay Minerals found the figure to be 5,8 to 1. Every mineworker has between seven and 11 dependants.
”Job creation and social plans to help mineworkers after working on the mines are fundamental,” says Gwede Mantashe, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers.
If the labour market is unable to use redundant skills, it is also failing to prepare young people for the new economy. According to Statistics South Africa, three-quarters of the unemployed are youth. Too young to remember the worst of apartheid, they are less patient than their forebears.
If Rapopo is South Africa’s shame, Collin Mafunda is its time bomb.
Young, gifted, black and jobless
For a group of youngsters hanging out at a shop in Dube, Soweto, the government and business will have to do some fancy footwork at the summit to regain their trust. ”After matric I got a personal computer technician diploma. I got a distinction, but I still have no job,” says Collin Mafunda.
”I went looking for a job at a company in Woodmead; the guy there told me I should get this qualification. After I did, he told me he had no vacancy. What do you call that?”
Mafunda says that to kill time, he and his friends play dice. They try car-washing and ”anything legal” to make money. ”We are ready to do anything as long as it can pay and it is not crime.”
Thabo Dube has a different story to tell. ”I will not lie to you. We do crime. But then you cannot expect me to wake up each day and ask my pensioner grandmother for money. Neither can I go house-to-house asking for a rand or two.
”I left school in grade 11 to study carpentry at a technical college. I had to drop out because my grandmother couldn’t afford the R465 a term fees.
”When the government came to power they promised jobs and a good life for all. Where are the jobs?”
Dube’s pal Mpho Mofya said he had given up on higher education as a means to employment. ”My sister spent a lot of money studying public relations; today she works at Edgars as a cashier. What is the point of going to school if that is the job you get in the end?”
The economy suffers a mismatch between skills and demand, so that many people are driven into the informal sector, often classed as ”self-employed”.
”The informal sector ballooned from an estimated 200 000 in 1995 to 1,7-million in 2001,” says Professor Eddie Webster, director of the Sociology of Work programme at Wits University.
”We need to reconceptualise work. The view that it’s simply paid employment is a partial view of economic activity,” says Webster. He says the informal sector symbolises South Africa’s increasingly ”dual economy” — the division between the formal and informal economies.
South Africa is following a well-worn path — in the rest of Southern Africa, only 10% of the workforce is formally employed. In an era of globalisation, says Webster, many workers are disconnecting from the global economy and moving into the streets.
Office on the street
When Godfrey Ndevu was released from prison in 2000 after a nine-year sentence, the first thing he did was buy a squeegee to wash car windows.
”I knew it was hard out there and I didn’t want to meet the bad guys and start doing crime again,” he says.
He is standing in what he calls his ”office” on Glenhove Road, Johannesburg. Located on the pavement, it consists of a bucket, the squeegee and a sign on a lamp-post reading: ”Crime-free zone: I am self-employed and proud of it. Please flip me a coin. I’ll brighten your day.”
”It’s hard surviving, but at least with this brush I know I am doing something,” says Ndevu.
Informal sector work does not fall into the category of ”decent work” the International Labour Organisation promotes as a benchmark and which trade unions emphasised in the summit run-up. Webster says this is secure work that offers basic rights and income security.
Simple strategies can help to make informal work more ”decent”. If hawkers were seen as part of city life, they could be protected by government regulation. Unions can follow the lead of the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which has started organising home-workers in KwaZulu-Natal. The government could identify and pay stipends for unpaid work, like caring for HIV/Aids sufferers, says Webster.
While the government has committed itself to slashing unemployment to 12%, University of Cape Town economist Haroon Bhorat believes it would be a phenomenal achievement to keep unemployment rates constant. Bhorat says economic growth since 1995 has not been entirely jobless, but that the growth in the adult workforce has been consistently greater.
Where, then, is the hope? Public works can only be a short-term palliative. But one ray of light comes from the BMW plant in Rosslyn, outside Pretoria, where highly skilled workers have connected with the global economy. The BMW 3-series is the second most popular imported luxury car in the United States. ”It’s an example of a company that has been able to take advantage of liberalisation and it’s been facilitated by the Motor Industry Development Programme,” says Webster.
Through the programme, the Department of Trade and Industry provides export incentives to the industry to produce a select brand of cars that can hold their own in the global market.
Bhorat points out that the main area of job growth has been in financial and business services, wholesale and retail — although the latter has largely been ”organic growth” in the informal sector.
And this is where the govern- ment believes it should target its effort — at encouraging job creation in growth sectors.
In downtown Cape Town, German-speaking South Africans now do Lufthansa’s bookings. Call-centres are the next frontier for job creation on any scale, because the country is English-speaking, and time zones are favourable for northern hemisphere mother companies. Call-centres have already generated 150 000 jobs, according to initial estimates.
These digital-age workers must also have an aptitude in ”emotional labour”, says Webster — they need good personnel skills to deal with the public. The digital age offers opportunities for those with suitable skills, as the final story of three entrepreneurs shows.
Whizz-kids
The next time a traffic officer stops you, punches into their cellphone and five seconds later tells you that you have to go to jail because of outstanding traffic fines, know that you’re the victim of three young Soweto whizz-kids.
Tired of doing odd jobs, childhood friends Justice Setlodi, Mokgatle Maesela and Lucky Seuoe, all of Rockville, put their heads together.
Two years ago, the three owners of 2Big Mobile Applications created a gadget that enables the Johannesburg Metro Police to access their data room by cellular phone and determine whether a driver has outstanding traffic fines.
”The opportunity came when we realised the cellphone market was changing the way people lived. Statistics showed that there were 14-million cellphones and only three million computers with Internet connection. Cellphones was by far the best way to reach people,” said Setlodi.
Last year they moved into Softstart, a technology and business incubator based at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research complex in Pretoria.
An initiative by the trade and science and technology departments, the European Union, Pretoria Technikon and the University of Pretoria, Softstart helps promising, upcoming software entrepreneurs with skills and facilities.
”We want to help up and coming software developers. People should be given a chance to develop their own equipment instead of being given computers,” said Maesela.
Small and medium-sized businesses like 2BigMobile are seen as the drivers of the new economy and job creation. The summit will consider better ways to support small enterprises, but the business delegation is likely to be more reticent about encouraging labour-intensive production.
The time line of jobs and joblessness from 1994 is one of the more complex stories of a new South Africa, one of contested choices and ambiguous ends.
The light at the end of tunnel is still far off — it is the tiny flicker at the end of the BMW workers’ welding torch.
The great GDP myth