A million jobs opportunities over five years at a cost of R20-billion. The public works programme revealed this week is the biggest, most precise and most expensive pledge the government has made since it came to power in 1994.
With President Thabo Mbeki announcing details of the Expanded Public Works Programme and Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel officially putting the money behind it in his Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), jobs are now at the apex of the government’s economic policy.
“It’s certainly well-conceived and government has taken a big risk,” said Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) economist Neva Makgetla. Cosatu has pushed for an economic policy that focuses on cracking unemployment.
In Pretoria, a team of 15 managers based at the Department of Public Works is putting the finishing touches to the plan, which will provide work in infrastructure construction, environmental protection programmes and community development.
The purpose of the expanded public works programme is two-fold. Firstly, to provide a safety net while high-growth industries (like motor manufacturing, high-value clothing production, and tourism) come into their own and create jobs. Makgetla warns that public works should not detract from formal-sector employment strategies — the lesson of the past economic cycle is that growth does not necessarily lead to large-scale employment.
Secondly, it is meant to help bring poor, unskilled and unemployed workers into South Africa’s formal economy, by linking skills training to every job. Every public works participant will receive at least two days’ training a month in formal-economy skills.
Sean Phillips, the head of Limpopo’s public works department programmes, has been seconded to the national public works department to assist with the development of the programme. He says R15-billion will be spent on public works infrastructure, disbursed through and managed by provinces and local councils.
Another R4-billion will go into environmental programmes such as Working for Water, while an initial R600-million will go to the community sector to fund a corps of community development workers likely to be deployed in providing home-based care for people living with Aids and in early childhood development.
Despite the downturn in revenue collection, more money will be available if the plan is implemented at scale over the next five years.
The unskilled will be employed to build low-volume roads and dig trenches for electricity, sanitation and water pipelines and storm-water drains. Labour-intensive construction will be a mandatory part of such tenders.
Opponents of public works often deride them as “digging a hole and filling it”, but the link to economic and development objectives — public capital investment — make such work intrinsically productive, says Phillips, adding: “The productivity and efficiency aims of public works should not be overridden by social aims.”
The “expanded” public works programme fans out beyond infrastructure into the environment and community work, says Phillips.
Already touted in political short-hand as a million jobs, this is misleading, with Mbeki’s careful scripting lost on headline writers. “The public works programme is targeting one million unemployed people in the first five years,” he said.
Moreover, like most public works programmes, the work is not sustainable. Such projects provide employment for an average four to six months; environmental programmes to clean coastlines or clear invasive plant species last for an average of a year. Community work is most sustainable, with experts predicting contracts of up to two years.
There are 4,7-million unemployed, according to the official definition, and 7,8-million according to the expanded definition, which includes people who have given up looking for work.
The efficacy of public works is calculated on how many households, rather than individuals, they reach .
Pay scales are low. Gundo Lashu, a programme in Limpopo, pays R30 a day. The Zibambele programme quoted by Mbeki pays just R41,75 a day. Public works are excluded from minimum wage laws.
If public works compete with private-sector formal economy jobs they defeat their own purpose. Payment is either daily or on a task basis; it is also flexible and, in some provinces, transferable within a household.
“Public works are necessary for a society where a proportion of the labour force is marginalised,” says Iraj Abedian, the chief economist of Standard Bank, adding that “the success of public works programmes depends on a capable state machinery”.
The government has acknowledged a shortage of skills to manage a public works programme in some provinces.
Capacity also needs to be spread across the country, says Abedian, or South Africa’s plan could go the way of India’s, where spots of success led to migration, defeating the programme when they were swamped.