Stop-gap solutions are never going to solve the endemic unemployment crisis in South Africa, which currently stands at almost 9 million people, with a broader definition of anywhere between 12 and 16 million.
A slight reduction in the unemployment rate from 34% to 31% is seen as positive, but it does not help the child who goes to bed hungry at night because her parents are unemployed.
The Western Cape brags that it has the lowest unemployment rate, but that does not help my friend’s child who was refused entry into his school because his unemployed parents could not afford a school uniform.
These are some of the realities poor unemployed people have to navigate daily, while politicians and our government promise how they are going to lift us out of poverty. Plans that never materialise.
Some of these grand plans do more harm than good, instead they exacerbate poverty and almost drive communities on the Cape Flats into a state of hopelessness.
The Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) is one such example, which is supposed to help our youth to gain work experience, teach the unemployed skills to offer employers in exchange for decent jobs and wages. It is supposed to create projects for the unemployed outside of the core functions of the City of Cape Town.
EPWP workers clean our streets every day, which is clearly a core municipal function, in the process, trapping these workers in a perpetual state of under-employment on three-month contracts, which pay way below the minimum wage.
Cost-cutting exercise
The City of Cape Town is using the EPWP as a cost-cutting exercise, an austerity measure to cut down on its wage bill.
The Back to Work Campaign (B2WC) has been campaigning for years against the EPWP and the way in which it is implemented.
At one time, the City of Cape Town had a permanent staff of 45,000 employees, but now employs roughly 30,000 people, shuffling 400,000 temporary employees in three-month “job opportunities”.
Why not call it a job? Because it cannot. The City contracts people in the EPWP and also outsources EPWP projects, leaving already-vulnerable workers at the mercy of tenderpreneurs who, in some instances, don’t pay the EPWP staff for months on end.
We know that the salaries of workers on the Cape Flats rarely support only themselves. With 15,000 posts no longer available at the City of Cape Town, many more than just the prospective employees have been short-changed, making communities so much poorer.
Unfortunately, poor people on the Cape Flats do not live glamorous lives like our politicians, who make laws and drive policies that are supposed to bring relief to the suffering of the poor, but are not based on the hard realities of the daily suffering of the unemployed.
EPWP equals extra stress
The EPWP is the idiomatic albatross around the neck of poor unemployed people. Without work they are stressed, when selected for an EPWP project, they feel somewhat relieved. The stress immediately comes back when they start working, because they know in three months they will be without a job.
With the EPWP, the City of Cape Town is not driving home any of the objectives and policy directives of the EPWP, but implements it solely as a wage bill cost-cutting exercise, putting profit/surplus/reserves above people, above the needs of the poor communities of the Cape Flats.
During his State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the following:
- Job creation initiatives: Basically expanding the EPWP and the Community Works Programme to provide income support, skills development and pathways to long-term work. This is a major issue, because the only commitment met by the City of Cape Town is to dismally provide income support way under the belt;
- Youth employment opportunities: Under the YES programme, the goal is to create 200,000 work experience opportunities for young people. Some companies are using this to phase out older staff and bring in young people on lower salaries;
- Skills development: Transforming the national skills fund. But why transform it, if it does not work?;
- Ten thousand labour inspectors: This is but a drop in the ocean, and will come down to 1,100 posts per province, meaning only about 100 posts in Cape Town. Ten thousand sounds impressive, but not when you analyse it properly; and
- Ten thousand agricultural extension officers: This also falls flat; the Western Cape is not a rural province, and Cape Town has a small agricultural sector.
These are some, but not all the announcements the President made that can have an impact on unemployment. As can be seen, these are solutions that have been put before the nation on previous occasions; therefore the need for words such as expand and transform, which are but only code words for failure.
We hope the finance minister will further elaborate on these on Wednesday, 25 February, when he delivers his budget speech, but we are not holding our breath.
The government’s intended expansion of the EPWP on the Cape Flats will be a further expansion of the misery and suffering of the unemployed.
Through the EPWP, the City of Cape Town is one of the major contributors to the causes of suffering, poverty, crime, social ills and almost hopelessness that sprout from high unemployment on the Cape Flats.
One of the core tenets of the EPWP was supposed to help prepare the unemployed for the job market, by providing temporary employment in which they can be trained in hard skills, to improve their chances at getting employed. Instead the City of Cape Town used the EPWP to:
- Keep the unemployed in a perpetual cycle of slavery, a short-term bondage with short-term job opportunities that take them nowhere;
- Reduce its permanent staff, causing the shedding of jobs in communities on the Cape Flats – jobs that are now no longer available to people who provide for their families and their extended families; and
- Rather fill its vacancies with EPWP temporary workers, labour broker staff and people employed by service providers who severely underpay them in order to make huge profits.
The EPWP as implemented by the City of Cape Town is destroying communities on the Cape Flats. Its short-term three-month contracts create stress, insecurity of tenure and anxiety. These short-term contracts are also an administrative burden to the City of Cape Town, as pointed out by the B2WC in many memoranda presented to the City of Cape Town.
The Minister of Finance should not provide any extra funding to the City of Cape to expand the already Expanded Public Works Programme, which to the unemployed is just an expansion of their misery.
Many on the Cape Flats and in the B2WC, and some in the labour movement want the EPWP to be totally scrapped, properly implemented or amended. Therefore the following should be considered:
- Equal pay for equal work. The national minimum wage should also be applied to EPWP workers;
- EPWP staff must perform only non-core functions. Core functions done by EPWP workers take away permanent posts in the city.
- EPWP workers who have been in a job for three months should be made permanent employees;
- The Labour Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and all other regulations, policies and legal frameworks that apply to workers should be applicable to EPWP workers; and
- There should be proper oversight of the implementation of the EPWP in all municipalities to end the exploitation of the unemployed.
Unemployment is a structural problem, and the government should make an effort to fix these structural problems, and not grasp at solutions that only make our problems worse.
Austerity measures are only making matters worse, driving our unemployment rate to more than 30%, with a youth unemployment rate of almost 60%. It is now time to put aside the neoliberal policies and start developing policies and programmes that are geared to solving the problems of the country and not dance to the tunes of the international capitalists and their institutions whose sole objective is mega-profits.
The government would be better advised to take into its confidence the organisations of the unemployed in this country to help find a solution to the unemployment crisis staring us in the face.
Against all odds, organisations such as the B2WC and others all over South Africa do their best to organise the unemployed, a sector that is not easy to organise, considering that its members are unemployed and can hardly afford to pay membership fees.
As organisations of the unemployed, some of us are able to mitigate against the suffering of our members through our own projects. Although useful, they can never attain the same scale and reach of government and business initiatives in making a big dent in the unemployment scourge that is dragging us down.
The government needs to launch big infrastructure projects to get our nation going; this will have major offsets. The more people employed, the bigger the tax base becomes, the bigger the Budget, and slowly the government can pay off its debt, and the need for austerity measures will disappear.
The government should look at developmental social welfare, in which those dependent on government grants are given the opportunity to drag themselves out of poverty, create sustainable livelihoods and work towards breaking loose from the welfare trap.
Social entrepreneurship should also be looked at, in which the government helps organisations of the unemployed to set up sustainable business and cooperatives in which the unemployed can earn decent livelihoods and have their dignity restored.
To meaningfully engage with the suggestions above and seriously tackle the scourge of unemployment, the state should engage with the organisations of the unemployed. DM
Moegsien Ismail is the media secretary of the Back To Work Campaign (B2WC), an organisation dedicated to the fight for rights on Cape Town’s Cape Flats.