Time to help unemployed

Who in our current crop of ‘leaders’ can disrupt this destructive system that only fuels inequality?

While SA was focused on the local government elections, Statistics SA published key data that passed a harsh judgment on the economy’s ability to care for the country’s people. In the year ended June, we condemned another 403,000 of our fellow citizens to poverty.

In the quarter ended March another 180,000 people lost their jobs. That brings the total of our unemployed to 5.7m — fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters — who have been stripped of the dignity of being able to provide for their families.

While it is a tragedy that nearly a third of those people able to work are unemployed, the bigger tragedy is that they have no imminent hope of escaping that situation.

As the politicians crisscrossed the nation seeking yet more power for themselves these past few months, none seemed to offer any revolutionary plan that would dislodge the stubborn curse of joblessness.

Yet if you’d just landed from Mars, the rhetoric directed at the poor would make you feel these were the most prized of people.

In their overzealous but superficial attempts to endear themselves to this segment of the voting public, some politicians even called them “the poorest of the poor”. But once the votes have been counted, our esteemed leaders retire to their comfortable lives in the top suburbs of our nation.

And the unemployed must go back to the depths of their own endless misery.

We in the middle classes should be more proactive.

It is not only our patriotic duty to lift our fellow citizens out of poverty and the indignity of joblessness, but it is one of the smartest investments we can make. The rich cannot sleep peacefully while their countrymen are hungry.

But who in our current crop of “leaders” can disrupt this destructive system that only fuels inequality?

It is not that difficult to know why we have so many jobless people, even though only Zimbabwe and a few other failed states have as high an unemployment rate.

It has become progressively worse since the late 1980s, when the world finally woke up to the horror that was apartheid and withdrew its capital from these sunny shores.

In their haste to bring about a human rights-centred workplace in the new dispensation, the founding fathers of our democracy passed laws that unwittingly made things worse and condemned even more people to poverty.

Those laws strengthened the hand of trade unions, which cast a ring of steel around the job marketplace. These unions have established themselves as a powerful bloc against their own relatives.

Whereas competition is acceptable everywhere else, it is in the market for labour that no competition is permitted. SA’s labour laws and organised labour unions make it impossible for the 5.7m unemployed people to sell their labour cheaply to any employer.

This is all in the name of preventing exploitation by capital. Thus we choose to condemn people to exploitation by poverty. Yet anyone who knows poverty will tell you that it is much better to be exploited by a capitalist than by poverty.

Now SA is talking about establishing a national minimum wage — whose task will only be to protect those already in employment.

Who speaks for the unemployed?

It should be up to us in the middle classes to loosen up barriers to the job market.

Relaxing the laws that make labour in this country among the costliest in the world should not even be a matter of debate. Such an intervention on behalf of the poor would be the kind of revolution that SA needs to develop and grow economically.

I shudder to think what a revolutionary act by the unemployed and poor youth would look like.