Читать книгу New South African Review 4 - Devan Pillay - Страница 14

Unemployment in South Africa is amongst the highest in the world and represents the most significant expression of the country’s deep and lingering socioeconomic crisis. According to the Quarterly Labour Force Survey for January to March 2013 (StatsSa 2013), the official unemployment rate stands at 25.2 per cent; this figure climbs to 36.7 per cent if discouraged jobseekers are included. Unemployment still bears an unceremonious racial stamp with the black population being the most affected (28.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2013), closely followed by the coloured population, while white unemployment stood at only 7.2 per cent.

Figure 1: Narrow and expanded unemployment rates, 2001-2013

Source: StatsSA (2008 and 2013), authors’ calculations for expanded rate

Note: The methodology of the labour force surveys changed in 2008, with the introduction of the Quarterly Labour Force Survey. For the period 2001-2007 we draw on the Historical Revision March Series, published in 2008, to facilitate comparison with the new series. For 2008-2013, we use the Quarter 1 figure for each year in order to ensure coherence with the previous period.

While government’s ‘official’ rate (excluding discouraged job-seekers) downplays the extent of the unemployment crisis, the ‘expanded’ rate appears to be a better reflection of the situation of the labour market. Indeed, the reason for excluding discouraged job-seekers from the unemployed is that they are allegedly less motivated (therefore less likely) to find work. While this may be true in certain countries, recent research shows that in South Africa ‘there is little to distinguish the searchers from the non-searchers in terms of their commitment to finding work’ (Posel et al. 2013).¹ As a result, ‘the non-searching unemployed form a legitimate part of the labour force and their exclusion from the official rate should be reconsidered’. As shown in Figure 1, the ‘strict’ or narrow rate has entailed a substantial underestimation of the number of unemployed people. Yet, even when only active job searchers were considered, the incidence of long-term unemployment in South Africa stood at close to 70 per cent of total unemployment in 2011 – meaning that two-thirds of those officially unemployed had been so for a year or more (OECD 2011). As a result, 59 per cent of the unemployed had never been in employment in 2008 (Leibbrandt et al. 2010).

In spite of the depth of the unemployment problem in South Africa, many economists have sought to explain it as an abnormality rather than engage with the dynamics that (re)produce it. This started in the early 2000s, with Bhorat emphasising ‘the simultaneous existence of a skilled labour shortage and unskilled labour surplus’ (2004: 976) to argue that skills development would be the key to reducing unemployment. This argument was profoundly flawed for, as pointed out by Makgetla and Van Meelis (2003): ‘Even if more jobs were created for skilled than for unskilled people, it does not follow that increasing skill levels would in turn generate more jobs.’² In the following years, drawing on dual labour market theories (which posit that there are two distinct labour markets, a formal and an informal), some economists have argued that ‘insider’ formal workers were forcing many ‘outsiders’ to either remain unemployed or to work informally (Kingdon and Knight 2007). Informal employment in South Africa is very low, however, especially by comparison with other African or middle-income countries, and much of its growth has been related to the informalisation of work rather than to new opportunities in the informal economy. Why can’t informal activities ‘soak up’ more of the excess labour in South Africa? Valodia (2013) suggests that:

Unlike most developing countries where small-scale, informal producers are able to capture a significant proportion of domestic consumption, the South African economy is dominated by large-scale, monopolistic producers with reach deep into the consumption basket of the South Africans of all income classes. Even in the most remote, rural and low-income communities, the basic consumption basket is dominated by goods produced in the formal economy, with very little – if any – capacity for local, informal producers to capture a sizeable proportion of local demand.

It is furthermore important to discard the notion that unemployment is high because informal wage employment is not captured by labour statistics; if anything, informal sector (especially self) employment is exaggerated by the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (Pons-Vignon, forthcoming).³ Following Pollin et al. (2006), our contention is that South Africa’s unemployment is a product of its structural economic features, with the three immediate reasons accounting for the very high unemployment rates being historically high unemployment, sluggish growth, and declining labour intensity of growth. Growth has overall been sluggish in South Africa since the late 1960s, with the exception of the period 2003 to 2007. Mohamed (2010) argues however that economic growth, during the latter period, far from being associated with long-term investment in the real economy, was linked to increased debt-driven consumption and speculation in financial and real estate markets and much of the growth in services employment was related to the outsourcing of low-pay services from manufacturing, in particular cleaning and security (Tregenna 2008). While the official unemployment rate had slowly declined during the 2000s, unemployment went up again after the economy recorded a million job losses in the wake of the global crisis. Last but not least, the continued dominance of sectors associated with the minerals-energy complex means that the most dynamic sectors are capital- rather than labour-intensive, with limited capacity to increase employment significantly even when they grow (Ashman et al. 2011). These structural features suggest that it will be necessary to change fundamentally the economic structure in order to tackle unemployment and poverty.

Largely ignoring these structural dynamics, debates about unemployment in South Africa have been dominated by calls for more labour market flexibility as the sustained unemployment crisis means that the national focus is primarily on job creation, often couched in ‘any job is better than no job’ terms. However, Bhorat and Cheadle (2007) have shown that the South African labour market was not rigid at all when compared to that of other countries:

Classified as an upper-middle income country, the comparisons across the regulatory indices are surprising. In the first instance, it is evident that South Africa’s measures of labour regulation compare quite favourably with those found in the rest of the world. In almost all of the individual regulatory sub-indices, South Africa yields a level of regulation that is lower than both the mean for upper-middle income countries, and for the sample of countries as a whole. For example, in the case of alternative employment contracts – the legislative regime governing part-time work, contractual employment and so on – South Africa yields an extremely low measure of labour regulation.

It is furthermore evident that if the roots of unemployment are structural, they cannot be reduced to a mere ‘frictional’ dimension related to a neoclassical understanding of the labour market as the place where supply and demand for labour meet. The focus on an imaginary ‘rigid’ labour market (and elusive ‘overpaid’ unskilled workers) is therefore little more than a diversion from a serious engagement with unemployment. It is all the more so that the South African labour market is in fact extremely flexible (and probably too flexible). Employers can do pretty much whatever they please in practice.