Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day
WHAT dire household
financial situation drove rock drillers to wage low-intensity war on their
employers in Marikana in 2012? Debt and dependants. That was the conclusion I
drew, not from what I knew about rock drillers, but by extrapolating from my
own experience in a middle-income black family, where my parents’ salaries were
expected to take care of almost everyone in the extended family.
It boggles my mind to
think how my parents did it when, at one point, there were up to 20 people
living in our home in the suburbs. What was happening was not some natural
"clan" way of African communal living transplanting itself into
modernity. It was the continuation of a model of South African industrial
economic relations in which black households came to depend on a relatively small
pool of income earners. Historically, the mining sector erected this archetypal
labour extraction model because, for a long time, the sector paid male migrant
workers as though their wives and children were healthily subsisting off the
land in the so-called "native reserves" — a well-documented
phenomenon that Achille Mbembe called "the racial subsidy".
By the 1970s, this
"racial subsidy" enabled white SA to enjoy the highest standard of
living in the world and it was the rise of labour militancy in that era that started
forcing employers to bear the true cost of labour.
It is the relative
success of SA’s labour in decreasing the "racial subsidy" over the
past 30 years that has seen wages and employment conditions improve across the
board, albeit unevenly.
Unfortunately, no one
could predict that, in the 1990s, a new political order would also coincide
with the rise of cheap imports from Asia, causing a jobs bloodbath from which
SA has never recovered. Since then, state grants to pensioners and children
have had the unintended effect of taking the place of wages as formal
employment shrinks. In doing so, grants have played a critical role in further
dismantling the "racial subsidy" borne by households, but have not
gone far enough because the unemployed dependants of working age increase.
Five-million young adults
who should be either in tertiary education or working are financially dependent
on someone else who is either working or receiving a state grant. In this
context, black earners are overwhelmed by ever-rising household expenses. For
middle-income professionals, the potential to opt out of shabby state education
and health adds further expense to existing extended family obligations. The
cash-flow solution for many households has been a revolving door of debt, which
was seen in Marikana, where workers watched their pay gouged by interest
repayments to microlenders.
This brings me to a
recent debate on the main drivers of inequality that was triggered by a column
by Mike Schussler and the subsequent responses by Jonny Steinberg, Gilad Isaacs
and Jeremy Seekings. The main focus of the debate was whether high unemployment
or wage inequality between bosses and workers was the main driver of inequality
in the South African economy. It struck me that at the heart of the debate was
the daily experience of black households and the precariousness of managing
many dependants over time.
Schussler’s blaming of
union wage demands rings hollow in a country where inequality was created by
the excessive "racial subsidy" that gave whites what they consider a
normal middle-class lifestyle. Black families are still playing catch-up.
Yet Steinberg’s response
was even odder when it presumed unemployed young adults would prefer to have
household breadwinners earn higher wages at the expense of creating job
opportunities for them. Seekings and Isaacs rigorously unpacked some complex
data sets but left me stuck in conundrums about which numbers should have
analytical priority.
This higher wages/greater
employment debate is important because it gives us a framework to look at the
structure of the average black household and its relationship to income. For
many black families, so much decision making really comes down to how to manage
the demands on the pay packet because too many people in the household do not
work.
