Unemployment means hardship for women, youth

Time for government to start delivering on its promises

THE alarmingly high unemployment statistics and the disproportionate impact they have on women and the youth underline the government’s obligations, which do not end with heaps of empty promises to better the lives of all the people.

For all that it had been warned of, was perhaps even half-expected, the findings of the Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the second quarter of 2021 released by Stats SA on August 24 were yet another deeply shocking announcement.

The setting for the final unravelling of the failure of our economic policies was already frightening.

With confirmation that this was the third fall in employment since the national lockdown in March 2020, pushing the unemployment rate to between 34.4 and 44.4%, and that the South African labour market is still more favourable to men than it is to women, what had been a worst-case scenario became reality.

The link between the 184 000 jobs created in the informal sector, the additional 186 000 discouraged work-seekers, and the profile of the affected women and youth detonated a bomb that not only ripped apart livelihoods but also served as a blood-curdling warning of what the lack of decisive government intervention and the naked capitalist greed may be capable of.

What happens now is that the digestion of the rocketing unemployment figures continues amid hugely elevated distress. Politicians are aware of the looming political and economic crisis in an election year, considering that more than 50% of people in the working-age population are officially unemployed.

The longer-term impact of the tipped scale between formal and informal economy is harder to assess, beyond the obvious point that it is alarming – or horrifying if you are a female household head or a young person aspiring to follow the sequential steps of adulthood – that the voice of the unemployment or workers in the informal economy now occupies the position that it does in the political decision-making environment.

Much will depend on the capacity of the ANC government to withstand this assault on their authority, and on developing relations between the various strands and strongholds of forces that drive informality both within and beyond South Africa’s borders.

Faster than the government expected, the informal economy filled the vacuum.

Now, before President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration reaches a midterm in office, we remain confronted by the runaway unemployment figures.

The concern is that Ramaphosa’s influence, after the government’s recently shamefully implemented economic recovery efforts, will be significantly reduced unless it is recalibrated to align with dominant forces influencing informality.

Already, the officially unemployed masses have located themselves in the informal economy through heroic entrepreneurship that appears as a spontaneous and creative response to the government’s incapacity to satisfy their basic survival needs.

This heroic entrepreneurship is characterised by low-entry requirements in terms of capital investment and professional qualifications, a small scale of operations, skills acquired outside of formal education, labour-intensive methods of production, and adapted technology.

Policymakers and those campaigning for votes have all along ignored, rarely supported, and sometimes actively discouraged the activities of the informal sector.

Now they will be confronted with the dilemma of selling manifestos that are silent on the needs of early childhood development practitioners, home-based carers, waste pickers and recyclers, spaza shop owners, taxi drivers, shebeen owners, abozama-zama scavenging abandoned mines, and izinyoka-nyoka connecting electricity to households, whose occupation is ascribed the lowest status in society.

They will be forced to articulate positions on the informal economy known to simultaneously encompass flexibility and exploitation, productivity abuse, aggressive entrepreneurs and defenceless workers, libertarianism and greediness, and, above all, the disenfranchisement of the institutionalised power conquered by labour during the early years of our democracy.

The audience with the majority of votes this time is the one that has all along been perceived by politicians as the politically passive group struggling to survive.

However, as the survey data confirms, its survival strategy model implies that the poor and the marginalised do not sit passively waiting for their fate or for the selfish politicians to determine their lives, but are active in their own ways to ensure their survival.

Thus, to counter unemployment – or the increasing cost of living introduced by price hikes in electricity, transport, water, food, school fees and uniforms – the poor have resorted to reorientation of their deployment of labour and consumption patterns; to respond to the lack of decisive government policy implementation, they have chosen to leave their home places to pursue precarious vocations even if authorities discouraged emigration and have chosen to embark on informal economic activities, even if authorities deny them licences and the infrastructure to climb the ladder of economic freedom back into the fold of the formal economy.

In this thinking, the poor are seen to survive and live their lives even though their survival strategies are at a cost to themselves or their fellow humans, as witnessed in the decrease in tax revenue due to the proliferation of counterfeit products in the market.

This might be another moment of reckoning for South Africa as we come to terms with the reality that informality is not the chaos that precedes order, but rather the situation that results from its suspension as the implications of the unemployment figures staring at us reconfigure our lives.

Politicians, including those outside Parliament, must honour their obligations, not only to those who voted for them, including the unemployed who must now increasingly depend on social grants and food parcels, but to the South Africa society as a whole.

The social partners in this country should find common cause in the attempt to give the people of this broken country a chance.

From a government perspective, this latest explosion caused by the unemployment data may have the appearance of a parting shot from the traditional constituencies that return it to office after every past election.

For women and the youth, the fear is that it marks the start of yet another hardship chapter of surviving in the age dominated by informality where irregularity and unpredictability of income have become deeply entrenched.