A black woman’s burden: Carer,
All indicators, including the employment statistics released this week show how black women bear the brunt of unemployment. Here are their stories
Kate Monama was employed at a grocery retailer through a contractor but when that ended, her life changed
drastically.
The mother of three from Tembisa can’t remember the last time she felt at ease or relaxed. She has not been able to get a job since her contract ended five years ago.
“It is not easy to secure a job when you don’t have a matric and sometimes I wonder how things would have been if I had studied further,” said Monama while feeding her baby. Her other children are outside. Today they are not at school.
Monama, who originally comes from Ga-kibi village in Limpopo, said life in Gauteng has not been what she had envisioned when she decided to move here. It is expensive and watching her days go by with no work has become a stressful daily struggle.
“I thought things would be easier because village life was slow. When I was employed, life was good and now I hate having to rely on others to survive. At least my partner gives me money sometimes but it is not nice to have to ask for money. Sometimes you don’t get it because people don’t always have money and sometimes, when you do get it, it might not be the amount that you need at the time.”
Besides her partner’s support, Monama relies on the child grant for her three children and that goes towards their lunch boxes, transport and diapers for her youngest child. The rest of the money is used to buy groceries for the family of five.
“If only Covid would end so that I can go out to look for jobs. Currently, I don’t even feel hopeful about finding one because people are losing jobs, so how will I find one?”
Monama is only one in millions of black women without a job. Unemployment numbers, released on Tuesday, have laid bare a hard, but long-established truth: all too often, women are shut out of the labour market.
According to the data — which showed that the unemployment rate has yet again hit record highs, climbing to 34.4% in the second quarter of 2021 — men are more likely to secure paid work than women. Women tend to take on more unpaid work, such as childcare, Statistic South Africa’s (Statssa’s) quarterly labour force survey found.
The rate of unemployment among women was 36.8% — 4.4% higher than the unemployment rate among men.
The statistics paint a dire picture of the country’s deepening unemployment crisis, which was sent spiralling by the Covid-19 pandemic and the attendant lockdowns.
A large proportion of South Africa’s labour force has given up looking for work, because jobs have become more scarce. The unemployment rate according to the expanded definition, which counts economically inactive workers as well as discouraged work seekers, is now at 44.4%. This number is the highest the country has seen since 2008.
According to the expanded definition, the unemployment rate among women was 48.7%, 8.1 percentage points higher than among men.
Digging deeper into the numbers, it becomes clear that some women have it harder than others.
The unemployment rate among black women was 41% during this period, compared to 8.2% among white women. This figure rose by 2.7% between the first and second quarter.
Black women have been the hardest hit by the pandemic.
Breadwinner Lerato Dumse, a writer and photographer from Kwathema in Ekurhuleni, watches days go by without being able to make a contribution to her family of five. This breaks her heart.
“I honestly can’t say how I’m coping, I’m just taking it day by day. My biggest comfort is having a supportive family. However, when I reflect on my age and not being able to tick stuff off my list that I had planned for, brings a lot of anxiety,” she said.
Dumse has also had to come to terms with not being able to pay for life insurance, something that she says adds to her fear for the future.
“I used to support my grandmother, mother and my three nieces. We are all women. We are now relying on my sister and this is not good because I have lost life insurance so the fear of dying and leaving them with nothing breaks my heart.”
Dumse lost her job as a project coordinator when the first hard lockdown was imposed. Thinking that the lockdown would last for 21 days, as announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in March last year, she donated some money to the less fortunate. It’s a move she now regrets.
Using her photography skills, Dumse decided to start a photography business. That too suffered a blow when level four lockdown was reinstated in June and July this year. While trying to keep her business afloat amid the lockdown, looting sprees erupted in some parts of Gauteng and Kwazulu-natal. That was the final blow to her promising business venture. But she is hopeful that her business will revive, if some sort of stability can be maintained.
Commenting on the statistics, Busi Sibeko, an economist at the Institute for Economic Justice, said South Africa’s economy is gendered. “And Covid-19 has exacerbated the structural inequalities that were already prevalent in our economy before, so what we’re seeing is just a manifestation of the structural inequalities that exist.”
Last year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned that women’s jobs were most in jeopardy as governments shut down their economies. In a report released in March last year, before the full effect
of the pandemic became apparent, the ILO noted that globally women are over-represented in the sectors most affected by lockdowns.
The ILO estimated that 58.6% of employed women work in the services sector, compared to 45.4% of men. “Women also have less access to social protection and will bear a disproportionate burden in the care economy, in the case of closure of schools or care systems.”
In South Africa, Sibeko noted, women caregivers were initially excluded from receiving the Covid-19 social relief of distress grant because recipients of the child support grant were ineligible. Women account for 95% of child support grants beneficiaries, who were only allowed to receive the R350 Covid-19 grant in July.
The exclusion of caregivers from the grant “demonstrated the inability of our government to really take gendered considerations seriously”, Sibeko said.
Research by the University of Cape Town’s Development Policy Research Unit shows the likelihood of Covid-19 grant recipients searching for a job was 25 percentage points higher than among those who did not.
A report based on the findings of the National Income Dynamics Coronavirus Rapid Mobile (Nidscram) survey, found that women workers suffered a large and disproportionate effect in the labour market as an result of the initial lockdown in April 2020 — both in terms of net job losses and a reduction in hours.
When the lockdown was eased, job recovery was slower among women than among men, the survey found. As of March this year, when the country was in its least restrictive lockdown phase, women still remained behind men in terms of reaching their pre-covid 19 employment levels.
Even though women accounted for the majority of the unemployed throughout the pandemic, they were also less likely to receive income support provided to unemployed and furloughed workers, the Nids-cram report noted.
According to the research, fewer women than men received money from the Unemployment Insurance Fund’s temporary employer/ employee relief scheme “probably due to fewer women being [formally] employed”. Data from Statssa shows that 22% of women between the ages of 15 and 64 work in the formal sector, compared to 29% of men in the same age range.
An example of this is Sarah Mokgobi, who has been a hawker for
more than 30 years. “Since the lockdowns, business has been very slow. There are no people to buy the atchar that I am selling. I am lucky if I make more than R100 a day and my landlord doesn’t care about my financial issues, as long as I don’t miss the rent payments at the end of the month. We are really struggling but what can we do?”
Selling is the only thing that Mokgobi has done for years. When the municipality called on hawkers to apply for permits at the beginning of the lockdown, she chose to trade illegally because of the financial constraints.
She has never considered or applied for any of the assistance grants, thinking she is not eligible.
The mother of three — two teenage daughters and a 27-year-old son, who is also unemployed — lives in Ivory Park in the City of Johannesburg. Mokgobi sells atchar at Swazi Inn, one of the busiest markets between Tembisa and Ivory Park. Before venturing into the atchar business, she sold chicken feet, livers, tripe, necks and gizzards.
Her spot is a few metres from the entrance to a Pick n Pay supermarket, which was looted in July. That has meant that fewer people are passing by to even smell the aroma from her garlic-flavoured and spicy atchar.
“Things were not as bad before
the store had to close down. At least people who were coming for some grocery shopping were able to see my atchar and maybe get tempted to buy it. Now there is just no business. I feel helpless because there is really nothing that I can do besides sitting here and hoping one or two people notice me,” said Mokgobi.
Her hopes are pinned on her children, especially the older ones. She hopes that her first born will find a job despite the economic climate where unemployment has become a growing headache for millions of
young people. For her second born, who recently completed Grade 12, she hopes that whatever she chooses to study,will not see her staying home with her diploma or degree.
Independent economist Duma Gqubule said joblessness among black women demonstrates that South Africa’s labour market “is a shocker”.
Every indicator relating to education shows that women generally outperform men, Gqubule noted.
According to data from the higher education department, more women than men graduated in every field of tertiary study in 2017.
“But then you see the opposite happening in the labour market. So they are not getting the jobs,” said Gqubule. “And then if you look at employment equity, African women are underrepresented at top, senior and middle management. This is way out of sync with their economic share of the population.”
The Commission for Employment Equity Report for the 2020-21 financial year, released in June, shows that 5.7% of top management positions were occupied by black women, compared to 13.1% by white women and 51.6% by white men.
Anita Bosch, a professor at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, said women face social pressure to take up unpaid labour such as childcare, instead of securing paid work. This is despite women being more likely to have a tertiary education.
“And so the men are often the ones being pushed into paid work … And if women have children, or perhaps ailing parents or grandparents that they need to take care of, it is much more likely that it would be them that needs to do the caregiving.”
Bosch noted that female-headed households tend to be much larger and extended than male-headed households, meaning that women frequently care for multiple family members. Data from Statssa showed that in 2015 female-headed households were bigger regardless of whether they were in urban or rural areas.
Mercia Andrews, the regional coordinator for the Southern African Rural Women’s Assembly in the Western Cape, said: “More and more we see women-headed households across the country. This means that giving a woman a job will help develop a whole support system that extends beyond the woman.”
She said unemployment among women is a crisis. “More women are becoming seasonal or casual workers. I don’t even know why they are considered employed … This has been the trajectory.”
Women’s livelihoods have become more precarious. “A woman might be a seasonal worker for part of the time, and other parts of the time she might do domestic work. Then she might look for work during December, but then sectors like tourism have been massively impacted by Covid-19.”
The situation has meant that women are in need of “other options” such as a basic income grant, Andrews said. “It is not as if people want to depend on the state … But what are the options when the economy continues to shrink?”