Читать книгу New South African Review 4 - Devan Pillay - Страница 15

The quality of jobs in South Africa has declined dramatically over the past twenty years. The implication is that working poverty, which was a structural feature of segregation and apartheid (Wolpe 1972), has all but disappeared. Many South Africans work long hours, but for miserable pay and in insecure, often hazardous conditions. Is any job really better than no job?

Non-standard forms of employment are increasingly common throughout the South African labour market, in line with the global restructuring of work which has led, through a great diversification of employment arrangements, to widespread precariousness. Contrary to what is often assumed, this is not restricted to the ‘margins’ of the labour market, but is increasingly a feature of its core (Chang 2009). In South Africa, restructuring started ahead of the transition to democracy and has since become a wideranging phenomenon in sectors as diverse as healthcare, mining and forestry (see Pons-Vignon and Anseeuw 2009; and Von Holdt and Webster 2005 for a broad range of case studies). In mining in 2008, one out of three workers was employed by a contractor or a sub-contractor (Bezuidenhout 2008), a figure which has probably increased in the wake of the 2012 violence across platinum and other mines. The forms taken by work-restructuring have been varied, and include the growth of third-party employers such as labour brokers and contractors, alongside a sharp rise in casualisation, documented in a vast range of sectoral case studies but poorly captured by labour force surveys (for a methodological discussion, see Sender and Pontara, 2010). Casualisation, for instance, entails work arrangements such as homework (Godfrey et al. 2005) or the hiring of gangs of workers by the day to perform certain tasks. With a few exceptions, for instance in transport (Barrett 2003) or metals and engineering, trade unions have not been able to counter employer strategies and prevent casualisation.

Labour casualisation has entailed a marked deterioration in levels of pay and security. In terms of pay, this is visible in the consistently low wages received by workers covered by sectoral determinations (see section 2), two-thirds of whom were classified as ‘poor’ in 2007 – with an increase in the number of poor workers in certain sectors since the adoption of a determination (DPRU 2010). In terms of employment security, out of a workforce of 13 million in 2008, 5.8 million workers were not covered by unemployment insurance; 2.7 million did not have written contracts; and 4.1 million did not have paid leave entitlements (Marais 2011). Workers have suffered most where employers have adopted task-based payment, which often leads workers to super-exploit themselves to meet unrealistic production targets (Pons-Vignon, forthcoming).

It is therefore unsurprising that the problems associated with the labour market have contributed to a sharp crisis of reproduction experienced by many poor people in South Africa.