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But what is ‘new’ about the so-called New Growth Path? By its own description, its ‘newness’ lies in its development of a model for economic growth in which ‘labour absorption’ (in the form of the long-term goal of ‘decent work’) becomes central. However, as Eddie Webster points out in his chapter in this volume, decent work is a goal that predates the NGP, stretching far back in the history of the ANC Alliance and originating in the policies of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the late 1990s. Hardly, then, something new. However, what is new about its prioritisation in the NGP is its linking of economic growth to job creation as a new development path and, as such, it calls, for example, for state interventions to promote private sector investment in job creation, in particular in sectors of the economy.

Webster also outlines in his chapter the fact that the NGP’s proposals for a new growth model conceptualise ‘decent work’ as a long-term goal whose only practical realisation will come about through short-term participation by the unemployed in created ‘opportunities’ for work that will help in developing their skills and discipline for promised ‘decent work’ some time in the future. Such ‘opportunities’ will continue to include the short-term contract jobs provided through the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), and new jobs (lower paying, and targeted at youth) to be created through subsidies provided to the private sector, as well as Community Work Programmes (CWP) through which state funds will provide low-paying work opportunities for a hundred days a year per person for the unemployed members of targeted communities.

Webster presents such a model as the only practical alternative, given the present character of the South African economy and labour market, and argues for the union movement and the private sector to accept the logic that the progressive realisation of decent work is the only possible solution to South Africa’s crisis of unemployment and low growth rate. In this call, the private sector is asked to concede that certain forms of labour legislation and protection are necessary for the upholding of certain norms and standards of ‘decency’ and ‘dignity’; and organised labour to concede that decent work in its proper sense (that is, full-time, permanent, secure waged employment) is only realisable in the long-term through its ‘progressive realisation’. He adds, however, that such an approach has to begin by addressing government inefficiencies in implementing policy decisions.

Some critiques of the ‘decent-work’ model open the NGP’s and Webster’s position to debate. Franco Barchiesi (2009: 52), for example, argues that while South Africa’s history boasts a rich collection of working-class struggles that ‘actively subverted waged work, both through direct refusal or through workers’ unwillingness to confine their claims to productivity requirements, a powerful disciplinary narrative has now emerged to celebrate the ‘dignity of work’ as a disciplinary construct that marginalises, stigmatises and criminalises specific categories identified as disruptive of wage labour discipline’. He argues that after apartheid, a revived discourse of the dignity of work ‘came to depict a virtuous condition of active citizenship rightfully enabling the full, practical enjoyment of formal, on-paper constitutional rights’. Barchiesi writes:

As work becomes the normative premise of virtuous citizenship, it provides an epistemic device with which South African society can be ‘known’ as an objective, socially ascertainable hierarchy ordered according to the seemingly natural, immutable laws of the labour market … At the pinnacle of such a hierarchical order stands a by now largely imaginary, patriotic, respectable, hard working, socially moderate, conflict-averse, deracialised worker as the virtuous citizen of democratic South Africa. Precisely as a creation of official imagination, however, such a subject indicates the practical conducts the poor have to follow, as workers-in-waiting, on their path to actual citizenship: avoid complaining, stay away from social conflicts, and actively seek ‘employment opportunities’ available in poverty wage schemes of mass precariousness like the EPWP. (Barchiesi, 2009:52).

In this way, the framing of the NGP as a commitment to the progressive realisation of decent work as an ultimate goal for the transformation of the South African economy (and society) could be read as an exercise in producing the discipline and control required for the functioning of a capitalist society in which full-time, waged employment is on the decline.

In this volume, Malose Langa and Karl von Holdt present the experience of a Community Work Programme (CWP) in the poverty-stricken community of Bokfontein in the North West province as a lesson in how work opportunities can shape a collective project through which trauma (related to past and present events) can be addressed and the potential threat of violence averted, while simultaneously providing spaces through which unemployed individuals are able to alleviate their poverty, and gain access to skills and/or experiences that potentially assist them in securing decent work.³ Langa and Von Holdt argue that the implementation of the CWP in Bokfontein has negated the need for service delivery protests, illustrating how good leadership bolstered by a facilitated process of democratic engagement among community members might have assisted in allowing participants to imagine themselves and their community differently from other communities in which service delivery protests have arisen. They express uncertainty, however, as to whether the tensions and cleavages that persist at the community level can be overcome without the continued assistance of external NGOs, and whether conditions generally will allow for the social cohesion that has characterised the Bokfontein experience to continue over time.

While they raise questions about the long-term sustainability of such projects, they nevertheless propose that the rollout of CWPs throughout poor communities in South Africa would be a worthwhile investment on the part of the state, even at an estimated cost of R10 billion for each one million jobs created. For them, the CWP initiative (currently consisting of fifty-six impoverished communities receiving assistance from the president’s office in the form of material resources and the support of NGOs)⁴ includes those excluded from waged labour in forms of work through which they are able to continue with the meeting of their basic needs in their everyday lives, and to stay committed to finding waged employment in the long-term, while at the same time contributing to a collective project of community building and development. They also suggest the potential for alternative imaginings of work (and relationships to labour) among those constrained by their lack of access to waged labour. For example, their narration of how some CWP members view their work in the project differently from that done on farms because it is ‘work done for the community’ signifies a potential for a very different approach to work unfolding amongst these individuals.

What distinguishes the Bokfontein experience from other initiatives such as the EPWPs is that it has been coordinated by NGOs external to the community (such as Seriti) which have been able to develop a methodology for facilitating collective processes of decision making and conflict resolution in relation to the CWP. This seems to have allowed for the collective identification of community needs and priorities, and the collective meeting of these priority needs through different work projects. While there seems to be the potential for such collective discussions and decision-making processes to re-imagine how work is given value, how it is organised, how its products are distributed and so on, the manner in which the CWP is currently structured and framed and the fact that it forms part of a national programme of decent work imagined as waged labour, means that any such potentials are foreclosed as waged labour is already prescribed as the solution to the problem – the problem of how to meet one’s basic needs, and not necessarily the problem of not having employment. Langa and Von Holdt, however, note that not all community members chose to participate in the CWP, and the question must be asked how else – outside the CWP and outside formal employment – other unemployed members of the Bokfontein settlement survive. While the experience of Bokfontein, as narrated by Langa and Von Holdt, provides a compelling case for how work can function as a successful means of social inclusion, and as the containment of any threats to social cohesion, it is important to ask what voices, experiences and approaches the imposition of such a work-centred discourse about citizenship and poverty alleviation neglects, and marginalises in so doing. In particular, it neglects the experiences of those who survive outside traditional forms of waged labour.

In their contribution to this volume, Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams present a historical account of cooperatives in South Africa. They focus on recent experiences of emerging cooperatives, in particular those owned, managed and controlled by formerly employed workers engaged in alternative ways of approaching and thinking about economic development and work in the context of their lack of access to full-time waged forms of work. Showing the failure, by their engendering of ‘business cooperatives’, of both the Afrikaner and African nationalist approaches to cooperative development, they argue that the continued use of ‘the Afrikaner empowerment approach’ in the more recent black economic empowerment (BEE) approach to cooperative development ‘eclipses the transformative potential of cooperative development from below’. Through the experiences of three contemporary worker cooperatives in South Africa, Satgar and Williams explore the possibilities and challenges facing those experimenting with alternative forms of ownership, production and distribution. The cases they present relate directly to the choices made by retrenched workers to find ways of surviving and living without access to regular forms of income in the form of their previous full-time jobs that came with proper salaries and protections.

While the NGP presents the notion of ‘decent work’ as the cornerstone of its ‘new’ developmental path, the experiences of Bokfontein and of the worker cooperatives presented in this volume suggest that the absence of work in its traditional sense does produce instances in which people imagine their productivity in relation to its collective, emancipatory value. In so doing, they refashion their lives outside the prescriptions of a traditional wage. What is significant about both experiences is that they present alternative ways of thinking about work. Exploring the potentials that exist among such forms of work (outside the traditional frame of the wage) might yield sustainable alternatives to private sector job creation.

While the CWP is clearly an attempt to think beyond the known solutions to the crisis of unemployment, it currently forms only a small part of the NGP’s approach to work. Other prescriptions for job creation rely largely on the greater involvement of the private sector, facilitated by incentives and subsidies from the state. Identifying the rate of economic growth and the employment intensity of that growth as two key variables that will affect the five million jobs target, the NGP argues for the maximisation of growth and surety that this growth will create more employment, particularly in the private sector. Aiming to ‘grow employment’ by five million jobs by 2015, the NGP identifies several ‘jobs drivers’ (areas with the potential for creating jobs ‘on a large scale’), which it predicts will create the required jobs.

These ‘drivers’ are the development of infrastructure projects; the agricultural value chain; the mining value chain; manufacturing sectors; tourism and ‘certain high level services’; and ‘the green economy’. While it sets out its own limitations with regard to the realisation of decent work, arguing strongly for a commitment to the progressive realisation of decent work over a time period in which short-, medium- and long-term possibilities are outlined for job creation, when it comes to estimating how many jobs could be created in each prioritised focus area, the NGP does not stipulate into which of these categories new jobs fall. It is thus unclear how the plans to create certain numbers of jobs in each priority area relate to the imagination of these short-, medium- and long-term goals. At a more fundamental level, it results in a lack of clarity about just how much decent work will be created through the NGP, and how many of the jobs created will be short-term opportunities ‘preparing’ individuals for the experience of decent work.

With such a high level of reliance on the private sector, given that the ultimate goal of business is to realise surplus value and the need to minimise labour costs to this end, it is doubtful that these jobs will reflect the characteristics of decent work. Even the state subsidies outlined in the NGP to support private sector job creation are seen as sustaining short-term, low-wage jobs usually targeted at younger people with less work experience. With flexible forms of work providing employers with greater means to minimise their labour costs, there are no existing incentives for employers to agree to greater protections and benefits for workers in the form of decent work. In fact, there has already been argument from some who fear that the NGP’s prioritisation of decent work will result in the enforcement of more stringent labour laws, dissuading job creation (Cloete, 2011; Sparks, 2010).

And, as the Congress of Trade Unions (Cosatu) (2011) has already pointed out, with so many of Gear’s principles re-committed to in the NGP, and with Gear having failed to meet its job creation targets, what guarantees are there that the targets so boldly announced for the NGP will be met? Today, 25.3 per cent of the economically active population is unemployed, with the figure rising to 34.4 per cent if the category of ‘discouraged workers’ is included (that is, those who have stopped looking for waged work) (Statistics South Africa, 2010).