A permanent job hard to find

Tshepo* has been a security guard for 12 years. Before that he was a hawker but ran out of money. He is part of another trend: low wages, even when work is permanent.

After 12 years of working 12-hour shifts, Tshepo confirms he earns a lot less than R12 000 a month. He is close to retirement age.

The numbers are sometimes disputed, but Statistics South Africa data suggests at least a fifth of South Africa’s workforce lives in poverty.

According to the International Trade Union Confederation’s (Ituc) 2015 Global Rights Index, South Africa, famed for its protection of workers’ rights, is slipping on that score. This year, South Africa was rated with Angola, Lesotho and Brazil, where there have been repeated workers’ rights violations.

Ituc estimates nine in 10 workers in Africa have informal work.

Schroeder says casual work is not recognised by South African labour law, yet workers are increasingly employed on a casual basis. There seems to be a sense of acceptance among many of these workers.

“This is partly because there’s a strong tradition of casual work in South Africa, and partly because the labour union movement hasn’t tried to organise these workers in any meaningful way,” says Schroeder.

These workers are invariably young, or immigrants, who are especially vulnerable.

UCT’s Theron says one option in combating the lack of permanent work is a self-help response — the formation of workers’ co-operatives.

He says there are cases where workers organise themselves in this way and have managed to earn a livelihood equivalent to a sectoral determination. “It’s working for something which you control, under conditions which you control. You may not be able to pay annual leave because there might not be enough capital at any one time, but you can be autonomous,” Theron says.

But government has moved to regulate co-operatives so heavily that they’re subject to the same standards as formal work. “With all the hoops you have to jump through, you are right back where you were,” he says.

Schroeder says there is no reason workers should accept anything less than permanent work. “It’s not that the nature of work has changed. Work doesn’t require more temporary workers. It is simply the bosses increasing their rates of exploitation ... The workers’ response is rational: they do the same work as permanent workers. It’s part of a successful struggle waged by the capitalist classes and there’s no reason why workers should accept that.”