If those who are unemployed have any advantage over those of us who are not, it must lie in the direct experience of what, for most of us (and certainly for most readers of this newspaper), is an abstract economic concept. A way needs to be found to bring home to us the reality of their predicament. How about a thought experiment that takes the unemployed counted in the September 2002 Labour Force Survey and lines them up along our national highways? The head of the queue is at the outskirts of Pretoria. It stretches out along the M1, then swings left onto the N3 to Durban . From Durban it heads along the N2, all the way to Cape Town . Leaving Cape Town , this mass of humanity is strung out along the N1 all the way to Johannesburg . By the September 2002 count, there were 7925000 unemployed. The distance along the route just described is 3791km. Little more than an arm’s length (about 478mm) separates members of the procession. Now set them marching, marching to Pretoria, past the Union Buildings, where the cabinet social and economic clusters seated at a table, under umbrellas to ward off the sun and rain that would alternately bake or drench them as the crowd shuffles by listen patiently as each person says, without stopping as they go past the table: “I want a job, please.” Moving at 5km/h, about 10450 of them would pass the table each hour. If the clusters work 40-hour weeks, almost 19 weeks will elapse before the last person makes their request. Not all of the unemployed require the ministrations of the great and the good who gather tomorrow at the Growth and Development Summit. Weeding out those who do not, will ensure that the minds of those who propose, design and implement policies to address this matter, are not cluttered with irrelevancies. First up is the question: Can we believe the numbers? Official statistics have taken a beating recently, but unemployment has attracted much more scholarly attention than the consumer price index. One of the more trenchant critics is Prof Lawrence Schlemmer. All he really said, however, was that many of the “unemployed” were not doing nothing. Some, like those waving a cloth to perform a parking service “we” do not need, were “working” for minute sums of money. The published numbers probably represent a reasonable approximation of reality, give or take 500000. To cull the less desperate, we turn to the distribution of the unemployed in households of varying spending levels. Of 25,7-million in the 6-million households where monthly spending is less than R800, more than 5,3-million lacked work. More than 70% of them report they cannot find any jobs the unemployed are not “choosy”. Worst off are those in households where total monthly expenditure is less than R400. Home to about 12-million people, the 3,2-million households in this category contain 2,7-million unemployed. Mean monthly per capita expenditure in these households is unlikely to exceed R75. The next expenditure class (R400-R799), had in it 13,6-million people, of whom 2,6-million were unemployed. Suppose all these people lied about spending levels to enumerators possibly out of a mistaken fear disclosure might affect social grantclaims. Even if they exaggerated their plight 100%, they remain very poor. In the poorest households, almost one third (32%) have people of working age, with not one employed. Excluding a handful of households lucky enough to have a pensioner, these households have about 1738000 unemployed. Assume Ellis Park Stadium seating capacity is 45862. It could be filled (by the poor debating government’s antipoverty policies?) with a different crowd drawn from among them each Saturday and Sunday for the procession past the luminaries. A slightly smaller stadium, one with a capacity of 35679, used on 19 consecutive Saturdays and Sundays, could play host each week to a “fresh” crowd of people from workerless households, taken from the 1352000 unemployed in the next expenditure category, R400-799 a month. The more than 3-million stadiumgoers singled out above constitute, it could be argued, an irreducible minimum for whom immediate relief is required. Growth cannot rescue them from penury the economy cannot grow fast enough. Learnerships will hardly dent the surface. Like it or not, black empowerment will empower only a minority. There have been some successes with public work programmes. Compared with the flood of potential programme workers, numbers reached to date are trivially small. Learnerships, empowerment, public works projects, all and any job creation avenues are important and must be explored. The very best that business and government can do, however, will still leave the majority of the unemployed poor and workless. Welcome as it undoubtedly is, the enlarged child support grant can do but little for the majority in poverty. The “social wage” about which government boasts when under pressure from those arguing that things are getting worse, cannot put food in the bellies of the hungry. The state does not have (and cannot create in any reasonable period of time) the institutional capacity to deliver targeted (means-testing millions of claimants) benefits to all who deserve them. Government views on the basic income grant range from the lukewarm to the antipathetic. This grant may be a second-best solution to the misery of income poverty associated with mass unemployment, but all else proposed so far is third-best or worse. Large-scale income transfers are the only practical way to address a problem that will be with us for many years to come. A determined effort could see the institutional framework required to do the job in place in less than three years. All that is required is the acceptance on the part of those who have of the urgent need to redistribute to those who have not.
Meth is with the development studies school, and Dias with the economics division at the University of Natal , Durban . This article first appeared in Business Day June 6 2003.