New South African Review 2. Paul Hoffman
the transformative potential of cooperative development from below’. Through the experiences of three contemporary worker cooperatives in South Africa, Satgar and Williams explore the possibilities and challenges facing those experimenting with alternative forms of ownership, production and distribution. The cases they present relate directly to the choices made by retrenched workers to find ways of surviving and living without access to regular forms of income in the form of their previous full-time jobs that came with proper salaries and protections.
While the NGP presents the notion of ‘decent work’ as the cornerstone of its ‘new’ developmental path, the experiences of Bokfontein and of the worker cooperatives presented in this volume suggest that the absence of work in its traditional sense does produce instances in which people imagine their productivity in relation to its collective, emancipatory value. In so doing, they refashion their lives outside the prescriptions of a traditional wage. What is significant about both experiences is that they present alternative ways of thinking about work. Exploring the potentials that exist among such forms of work (outside the traditional frame of the wage) might yield sustainable alternatives to private sector job creation.
While the CWP is clearly an attempt to think beyond the known solutions to the crisis of unemployment, it currently forms only a small part of the NGP’s approach to work. Other prescriptions for job creation rely largely on the greater involvement of the private sector, facilitated by incentives and subsidies from the state. Identifying the rate of economic growth and the employment intensity of that growth as two key variables that will affect the five million jobs target, the NGP argues for the maximisation of growth and surety that this growth will create more employment, particularly in the private sector. Aiming to ‘grow employment’ by five million jobs by 2015, the NGP identifies several ‘jobs drivers’ (areas with the potential for creating jobs ‘on a large scale’), which it predicts will create the required jobs.
These ‘drivers’ are the development of infrastructure projects; the agricultural value chain; the mining value chain; manufacturing sectors; tourism and ‘certain high level services’; and ‘the green economy’. While it sets out its own limitations with regard to the realisation of decent work, arguing strongly for a commitment to the progressive realisation of decent work over a time period in which short-, medium- and long-term possibilities are outlined for job creation, when it comes to estimating how many jobs could be created in each prioritised focus area, the NGP does not stipulate into which of these categories new jobs fall. It is thus unclear how the plans to create certain numbers of jobs in each priority area relate to the imagination of these short-, medium- and long-term goals. At a more fundamental level, it results in a lack of clarity about just how much decent work will be created through the NGP, and how many of the jobs created will be short-term opportunities ‘preparing’ individuals for the experience of decent work.
With such a high level of reliance on the private sector, given that the ultimate goal of business is to realise surplus value and the need to minimise labour costs to this end, it is doubtful that these jobs will reflect the characteristics of decent work. Even the state subsidies outlined in the NGP to support private sector job creation are seen as sustaining short-term, low-wage jobs usually targeted at younger people with less work experience. With flexible forms of work providing employers with greater means to minimise their labour costs, there are no existing incentives for employers to agree to greater protections and benefits for workers in the form of decent work. In fact, there has already been argument from some who fear that the NGP’s prioritisation of decent work will result in the enforcement of more stringent labour laws, dissuading job creation (Cloete, 2011; Sparks, 2010).
And, as the Congress of Trade Unions (Cosatu) (2011) has already pointed out, with so many of Gear’s principles re-committed to in the NGP, and with Gear having failed to meet its job creation targets, what guarantees are there that the targets so boldly announced for the NGP will be met? Today, 25.3 per cent of the economically active population is unemployed, with the figure rising to 34.4 per cent if the category of ‘discouraged workers’ is included (that is, those who have stopped looking for waged work) (Statistics South Africa, 2010).
BROAD-BASED INEQUALITY?
While the progressive realisation of decent work focuses on the necessary social inclusion of those most destitute – the unemployed and poor – deracialisation of the higher echelons of the economy continues to be attempted through black economic empowerment (BEE) and broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE). While the policy shift to B-BBEE, emerging largely in response to criticisms raised by black business and organised labour, has been presented as a means of preventing the process from benefiting elites and individuals, the experience has continued to be one through which a minority has gained. Situating the evolution of BEE as an institution in post-apartheid South Africa at the level of the development of the business– state relationship, Don Lindsay’s chapter argues that the absence of a proper controlling policy framework has allowed corruption and cronyism to flourish.
Lindsay argues that, coming to be viewed as the vehicle through which good relations between the incoming ANC government and business could be built, the interests of elites and individuals in both spheres have dominated and defined how this process has unfolded. While policy discourse then reflects commitments to economic redistribution among the entire South African population through increasing the access of all groups of black people to economic opportunities, in reality it has been a few individuals and families (with the right political capital, and/or with access to financial capital) who have benefited from the actual policies of BEE and B-BBEE.
Also in this volume, Jane Duncan provides an analysis of the failure of BEE and B-BBEE policies in meaningfully transforming print media in South Africa. She argues that in spite of the newspaper industry being significantly different from what it was twenty years ago – with more racially representative newsrooms and cutting-edge investigative journalism that contributes towards holding those in power to account, and the support of black small business and corporate social responsibility – it ‘tends to prioritise the worldviews of those with power and money, who predictably tend to occupy the centre of the political spectrum’, with a lack of linguistic and geographic diversity, and women still lacking a significant voice. She writes: ‘The fact that newsrooms have more black people and women has not automatically led to a transformation of content on these levels’. Noting a continued lack of diverse forms of journalism or media models, with the professional model of journalism and the commercial model of media remaining the dominant models of media production (even in the community-media sector), Duncan also highlights that BEE and B-BBEE deals that saw the transfer of ownership to black hands (as well as to trade unions and women’s organisations) after the end of apartheid, unravelled ‘as they were financed through debt rather than equity’. This spelt the withdrawal from the print media industry of BEE companies like Kagiso Media, Dynamo and New African Investment Limited and New Africa Publishers, leaving control once again to the big four companies that have dominated the market – Independent Newspapers, Avusa Ltd, Media24 and Caxton.
Duncan supports the idea of a transformation charter for the print media through which goals, models, and measures set for transformation of the sector are not reduced to a narrow framework of BEE or even B-BBEE. For Duncan, it is not only the deracialisation of the newspaper industry that is necessary, but also a change in the ways in which content is produced, editors appointed, editorial priorities set and determined, audiences defined and prioritised – overall thinking, in other words, about models of media production. Through a close analysis of the industry since 1994, Duncan provides a rich and nuanced case study of the failures of BEE, and of the print media post-apartheid.
Returning to the issue of inequality at the level of individual income, Don Lindsay argues that even where statistics do demonstrate improvements in individual income levels, the post-apartheid period continues to reflect race-based patterns of income inequality, perhaps an argument for why greater emphasis