Jobs sketch the contours of SA’s new great divide
The middle class has become increasingly black since 1994, but joblessness is creating a new urban underclass, writes Owen Crankshaw
THERE is a persistent belief among many South Africans that the apartheid characteristics of our cities are unchanged. Whites are still rich and live in the “leafy suburbs”. Blacks (Africans, coloureds and Indians) are still poor and live in the “dusty townships” and informal settlements.
Our cities are therefore seen as being the same as they were during apartheid, reflecting unchanging patterns of racial inequality in jobs and housing. The implication of this argument is that, somehow, the ANC government has been powerless to transform our cities.
But research does not support this claim. It is true that, overall, racial inequality has declined only slightly in the past 20 years. But this does not mean that nothing has changed.
In fact, racial inequality has not disappeared precisely because our cities have changed fundamentally. In other words, the kind of inequality that exists today is different from the kind we experienced under apartheid. There are new causes of today’s inequality that are also quite different from those that existed during apartheid.
The fundamental change is that inequality within races has increased.
Most significantly, the upward mobility of well-educated blacks into managerial, profes- sional and technical jobs has resulted in a large, well-paid, black middle class.
At the same time, many lesseducated blacks have become poorer because of rising unemployment.
Whites have become more unequal but have remained, on average, wealthier than blacks. So, although the average income difference between whites and blacks has not changed much, this is because the growth in the number of poor, unemployed
In the formerly whites-only suburbs of Johannesburg, two-thirds of the residents are now black
blacks has been matched by the growth of well-paid blacks. As a result, the average income for blacks, relative to whites, has increased only slightly.
How large is the black middle class in our cities?
The population census and survey results show that the black middle class has grown from about one-fifth of the total middle class in 1970 to about half to two-thirds by 2013. In other words, whites are now a minority race in the middle-class jobs of managers, professionals and technicians.
There has been a similar trend among non-manual clerical, sales and service jobs.
In 1980, fewer than half of these jobs were occupied by blacks. By 2013, the percentage of black clerical, sales and service workers had grown to 85%.
So racial inequality among those with jobs is declining steadily as more and more blacks are employed in jobs once monopolised by whites.
Whites are no longer overrepresented in clerical, sales and service jobs. They are still over-represented in managerial, professional and technical jobs, but their proportion is declining steadily.
These results should not surprise us. Since the dying days of apartheid, there has been no statutory racial discrimination in terms of access to education or jobs. On the contrary, government policy since 1994 has promoted the employment of blacks in jobs previously monopolised by whites. Furthermore, there was tremendous growth in all middle-class and clerical and sales jobs.
In 1980, the number of managers, professionals and technicians was about one-third of all manual workers. By 2013, the number of managers, professionals and technicians had grown to the same number as all manual workers.
Similarly, in 1980, there were only half as many clerical, sales and service workers as manual workers. By 2013, there were just as many of these whitecollar workers as there were manual workers. This large increase in middle-class and other white-collar jobs could not be met by the small number of whites in our cities. The result was the steady integration of blacks into these jobs.
However, the racial integration and declining inequality among blacks and whites in middle-class and white-collar jobs stand in sharp contrast to the growing inequality between South Africans who have jobs and those who do not.
An important cause of urban poverty today is the high rate of unemployment among lesseducated blacks. This is a new form of poverty, which has be- come an important cause of racial inequality. In 1980, for example, Cape Town’s unemployment rate was only about 5%. Since then it has grown to about 25%. And the causes of this high unemployment are not simply a consequence of continued racial discrimination. Unemployment has grown largely because the rate at which jobs have increased has been slower than the rate of population growth. This is why so many of our youths are unemployed.
Another important reason is that semiskilled and unskilled manual jobs have not grown as much as clerical, sales, managerial, professional and technical jobs. So we have a skills mismatch: a shortage of nonmanual or white-collar workers and too many manual workers. Poorly educated workers are more likely to be unemployed than those qualified to do nonmanual jobs.
These changing patterns of inequality in the labour market are resulting in new patterns of residential integration and segregation in our cities. The growth of the black middle class has led to the racial desegregation of the suburbs. In the formerly whites-only suburbs of Johannesburg, two-thirds of the residents are now black (and this excludes the tenants of back-yard “granny flats”).
The townships have changed too. On the one hand, they have benefited from the post-apartheid government’s commitment to developing public services and housing for the poor. On the other, they have seen the steady growth in back-yard rooms and informal settlements where the unemployed live: the rate of unemployment in the poorest townships is higher than 40%.
So, the new pattern of residential segregation in our cities is not the same as apartheid segregation. This new pattern of segregation is a division between the racially mixed, middle-class suburbs on the one hand and the black, workingclass townships with high levels of unemployment on the other.
What are the implications of this new kind of inequality for policy? If we wish to reduce inequality, we need to go beyond the current policy of affirmative action, because it benefits only the black middle class.
We also need policies that will encourage businesses to employ low-skilled manual workers. This will help to reduce unemployment in the short term.
In the longer term, we need to fix our schooling system and generally spend more on education at school and university levels. This should go some way to preparing our youths for employment in the growing world of non-manual jobs.
Crankshaw is professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town. This article draws on the results of his joint research with Dr Jacqueline Borel-Saladin (Human Sciences Research Council) and the published work of Professor Murray Leibbrandt and his colleagues at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at UCT Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.timeslive.co.za