Without jobs, have nots can never have
November 2, 2009
 By Quentin Wray
Unemployment is, if you'll excuse some horribly mixed and mangled metaphors, the Sword of Damocles hanging over the house of cards that is this country. A place like South Africa, with huge disparities in incomes and living standards, can only remain stable if the "have nots" have a reasonable expectation that they can become "haves" through hard work and education.
Take this away and any nutcase with a loud hailer, an agenda and a weak understanding of economics can rustle up a sizeable following of desperate people.
Creating jobs is central to giving people enough hope in the future to stop them from rising up in protest. Anything less is unsustainable as it relies on the government's ability to shell out ever-increasing amounts of money to the poor.
But job creation is a lot harder than it looks and is certainly a lot more complicated than the ideologues on either end of the economic spectrum would suggest.
There are only three ways it can be done, all of which have serious limitations. One, the state can employ people, two, the private sector can take them on or three, they can become self-employed and, if all goes well, create jobs for other people.
But the government's capacity to employ people is limited. It gets its money from taxes and duties and from raising debt. Both sources are limited and excessive plundering of either by the state will inevitably dry them up.
The private sector is now in trouble but, even in the good times, is loath to employ more people because labour is relatively expensive, unproductive and difficult to get rid of. Policy uncertainty, threats of nationalisation, the banning of labour brokers and other business-unfriendly practices just make this worse, so businesses get by with the minimum number of workers required.
The trick is to grow this minimum number by improving the business climate to a point where businesses become keen to invest because that's the only way they will be able to ride the growth train.
After all, who wants to take on people unless you know you're going to be able to afford them over the long term?
That leaves the entrepreneurs. But they have got too much stacked against them. Lack of education and training, slow payment by government departments, unskilled labour, red tape, tight-fisted banks... the list just goes on.
South Africa was able to create jobs over the past decade, but a lot of this can be attributed to luck. The global economy was in its longest post-World War II boom and we were like a boat on the tide.
We rose with the world economy and sensible economic (if not labour and industrial) policies meant the country was able to benefit. Jobs were created.
But when the tide went out again, it took with it all that it had brought and now the system is being blamed for the pain that we're in at the moment.
Rather than chucking blame around, we should be examining what realistic and practical steps, no matter how unpalatable, can be taken to ensure that every job is fought for and that none are lost which could be saved.
When things are back on track, the hostilities can again commence, but fighting ideas just because you either didn't have them yourself or don't like them is short-sighted, self-serving and petty.
We are in a crisis and it is time for politicians, trade unionists and business leaders to put aside their differences and get on with the job at hand. There are more than 4 million people out there counting on this.
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