Spazas remain a hot potato

SERIOUS SITUATION: THE SECTOR HAS UNDERGONE EXTENSIVE CHANGE IN THE LAST DECADE

Countries labour laws are often being violated by townships’ informal shop owners.

Small informal retailers are an ubiquitous feature of any developing country’s urban landscape. Known as spaza shops in South Africa, they are an important, even vital, component in the townships.

Numbering over 100 000 throughout the nation, they make critical contributions to local food security, self-employment and community cohesion.

In the last decade, the sector has undergone extensive change.

A new class of traders has emerged. They have often – but not always – been foreign.

For this reason, this changing character of SA’s spaza sector has become associated with chauvinistic and xenophobic portrayals of immigrant shopkeepers.

On the one hand, angry locals, often egged on by opportunist politicians, have accused foreign traders of destroying SA livelihoods. On the other, those questioning this xenophobia have tended to argue that the new class of traders simply represent “better entrepreneurs”, who are out-competing less dynamic traders. But much more is going on. The Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation and the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) conducted business censuses and interviews with 1 100 township grocery retailers across all nine provinces.

Findings suggest SA’s rule of law is in danger of becoming a casualty in an industry that has rapidly adapted in order to compete and survive.

Operating from rural, peri-urban travel expenses to SA. Employers retained their passports.

Some 71% of spaza employees were required to sleep in the building.

These conditions clearly violate the country’s labour laws, which stipulated retail workers must earn at least R3 701 a month for a 45-hour work week; 12 hours of rest in each 24-hour period, or 36 consecutive rest hours per week, including Sundays, unless agreed in writing.

One problem is that debates about informal township businesses have been framed in an unhelpful way. For example, it is assumed that the regulatory choice lies between “protectionist” regulations favouring South Africans, or deregulation and tolerance of immigrant entrepreneurs.

This approach underestimates the seriousness of the situation and misrepresents the nature of the regulatory choices required.

The SA government already has the capacity to create a fair and supportive regulatory framework. All that’s required is for the departments of labour, home affairs, state security, the SA Revenue Service, SA Police Service and local municipalities to limit regulatory avoidance in township grocery markets.

Municipalities must stop succumbing to the corporate developers of township shopping malls. They must also reconsider expansion of supermarket chains into the heart of townships.

Both these developments have forced the township grocery sector into a choice between shutting down or embracing informalist business practices.

Responsibility also lies with SA’s corporate manufacturers and wholesalers.

Republished from

Andries du Toit is director at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape.

Leif Peterson is co-director of the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation and was the lead investigator.

The Conversation