Jobs, dreams and why we should care

Last year, the budget and Statistics South Africa’s unemployment data were set to drop in the same week. At the last minute, however, the latter (which has historically had a very sobering effect) was postponed, creating some welcome distance between the two. It was conveniently replaced in the news cycle by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Said unemployment data is now scheduled to be published next week. It’s a print that I both dread and relish for pretty much the same reason — because, compared to other economic data, it tends to give a good reading of the economy’s whimpering pulse.

Like many others, in the past I have read the data through quite simplistic terms: jobs in versus jobs out. 

But lately I’ve been thinking of how South Africa’s economic crisis has robbed us of so much more than just jobs. It has also limited the breadth of our dreams and deprived us of our capacity for care. These are two underestimated elements of a healthy economy, which ought to influence labour-related reforms.

It is interesting to view the state of South Africa’s labour market next to America’s, which is in the throes of its own, very different, crisis.

For the past two years, the US labour market has been shaped by the so-called “Great Resignation” — the trend, predicted by academic Anthony Klotz, that saw millions of Americans quitting their jobs in the aftermath of the pandemic’s economic turmoil. 

With their pockets lined with stimulus cheques and unemployment benefits, and after having come face-to-face with capitalism’s callousness, many workers were left questioning the virtues of employment. The result was that there were more jobs in the US labour market than there were workers willing to do those jobs. And with this supply-demand relationship thrown off balance, wages grew at their fastest pace in decades.

Like the Great Depression before it, this phenomenon signalled a crisis of capitalism and thus an opportunity to re-organise around it.

If you have an economy with a dog-eat-dog labour market … dogs will eventually eat dogs

This level of quitting, American journalist Derek Thompson wrote of the Great Resignation, “is an expression of optimism that says, We can do better”. 

“Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn’t support them while they looked for a new one. But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out.”

Others called this phenomenon the “Great Realignment”, having prompted employers and workers to re-evaluate their priorities. In other words, this “crisis” presented many with the opportunity to dream up another future of work.

Compare the US case to South Africa’s labour market, in which there is a dearth of jobs and wages have declined in real terms. 

In these conditions, jobs are not dreams — good excuses to spend your days doing something that, as Marie Kondo put it, “sparks joy”. Instead, they are a means to an end. Not only is the job search constrained by the desire to simply survive, but when employment is mercifully secured it’s benefits are also only enough to simply survive.

On top of this, many jobs have been deprived of concern for the human beings doing them. Like in the US, people are increasingly feeling that their jobs are hostile to their wellbeing. However, in South Africa they have little option but to stay.

Worryingly, an often touted solution to the country’s bitter unemployment crisis is to make the labour market even more unforgiving by deregulating it. 

Employers, proponents of this approach suggest, should be able to fire their workers free of the inconvenience of labour laws or unions, hire without equity constraints and set wages low enough to maximise profits. 

But there is a human cost to all this. And, like it or not, economies very much rely on humans — for their skills, their knowledge and their inclination towards innovation. And though jobs, as we have learned, have a tendency to suddenly disappear, we continue to have a wealth of people.

So instead of taking the rather brutal free market approach, can we do the opposite? We ought to be able to.

There are, after all, economic approaches elsewhere that have put care right at their very centre. I’m of course referring to the Nordic model, which, among other things, puts a special emphasis on giving women, who might otherwise be absorbed in unpaid care work, more freedom to participate in the economy. This is achieved by giving them, and their partners, longer parental leave and free, reliable, childcare. 

The logic implicit in this type of model is that there are actually plenty of jobs, it is just that people aren’t being paid to do them — and that the people who are doing them, for free, could be better spending their time doing something that gets them closer to their dreams.

It is an important model to mention because one major lesson imparted by both the Covid-induced bloodbath and the Great Resignation was that women were less likely to find themselves back at work.

But policies like these take imaginative and willing governments to see them through. They also require efforts by those governments to increase the public sector’s share in the economy, rather than to shrink it.

This, I suppose, brings us full circle — to the budget. Because, more often than not, changing the shape of economies so that they better speak to our humanity requires public spending. 

A true understanding of the depth of South Africa’s unemployment crisis, which also takes into account all the lost dreams behind those breathtaking job numbers, means making the case for some type of stimulus is actually an easy one. 

Indeed, many these past few years have warned that the festering discontent arising from stubbornly high levels of unemployment raises the risk of social upheaval, a homegrown Arab Spring far more potent than the unrest of July 2021. This tracks because, after all, if you have an economy with a dog-eat-dog labour market, the expected outcome is that dogs will eventually eat dogs.