SA’s 4FoP (3/6) : Labour
This series is made up of 6 essays which are the introduction, the four factors and lastly the concluding remarks. The following essays will delve into the aspect of South African land. Building on the Land essay delves into what constitutes labour, how the South African labour force came into being and how this remains relevant in the unemployment crisis in South Africa.
SA’s 4FoP(1/6): Introduction — to access this first essay click here
SA’s 4FoP(2/6): Land— to access this first essay click here
When we refer to labour, we speak of any physical or mental effort by humans to produce goods or services. Labour is one of the 2 human elements in the factors of production, therefore it is to be distinguished from entrepreneurship. Labour is composed of the people who volunteer their efforts towards a particular establishment for remuneration in return. This remuneration is at a predetermined rate decided by the entrepreneur who seeks to employ the labourer. Inherently, this introduces a power dynamic between an employee and their employer.
This concept of a labourer was initially quite foreign when it was introduced in South Africa. The idea that there was a distinction between the one who ploughs the field and the other who reaps the harvest was ridiculous. The natives who had organised themselves as subsistence farming communities had no conception of a job. Ordinarily, Chiefs would assign land to families who would then build kraals which they laboured by themselves for their own sustenance. It would then make no sense for one to volunteer themselves to a neighbour or a stranger’s land over their family’s land. This makes it nearly impossible to seduce the native into becoming a labourer. Not even the shiniest of dimes could compel them to abandon their wives and children, land and its produce or kraals with cattle to work for another person. What would the objective or reason be? To feed their wives and children?
The idea of even using this framework of the 4 factors of production encounters an issue. It splits the human into 2 categories. The entrepreneurs and the labourers, or as Marxist theory would suggest, the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. It takes European standards of a working class, and a ruling class, in an attempt to understand the South African native society; whereas the communities were organised differently. This issue is important to note. It signals that sometimes European knowledge does not fit neatly into the understanding or conceptions of other parts of the world. You may wonder what happens as it encounters this issue at this juncture… It overrides the error as a malfunction and violently imposes itself as the new norm. It finds ways by whatever means possible to affirm what it knows to be true. This is precisely what happened in South Africa.
Firstly, having violently seized the land of the native people forces the natives to either remain as subjects of the coloniser or to flee from their own land. As the colonial expansion grew in Southern Africa, avoiding this new reality by fleeing it became increasingly difficult. The colonisers manufactured an artificial ‘class stratification’ between themselves and the natives. This was not necessarily because there was any shortage of land, instead, it was to create conditions under which the natives would be desperate enough to work for the settlers. This was achieved by stripping them of everything they would have rightfully owned and needed to survive to accommodate the Europeans’ modern conceptions of how value is produced. This of course alludes to these 4 factors of Production.
Although there was slave trading in parts of Africa, in Southern Africa this slavery was largely localised. This is part of the elements that characterise a settler colony. The natives were not just commercial tools but had become complete subjects of their colonisers in every way possible. They were not just solely preoccupied with the production of food on the farms but met several other forms of needs as well. This included fetching water for the settler, constructing a shelter for the settler and even satisfying other unspeakable physiological needs of the settler. Even when the settlers engaged in wars like the British and the Afrikaners’ Anglo-Boer war, the native subjected himself to defend the settler’s Safety needs. Many native Africans lost their lives fighting in wars in defence of their masters. This kind of relationship between the Labourer and the so-called “Entrepreneur” was unnatural. It is inherently toxic, to say the least.
Even though the British Cape Colony had abolished slavery in the 1800s, the conditions to enslave the natives had already been created. This pronouncement had little effect on their lives. Landless and poverty-stricken as they were, many of them remained as labourers subservient to their masters. In this way, an agricultural industry would be developed using the skills and abilities of the natives, who were previously subsistence farmers. And from the multitudes they produced, they would only be granted a handful of portions to keep them alive and energised to work the next day.
Another critical industry that arose from the primary sector is the discovery of minerals. This started in Kimberley, with the diamond rush, and later in Witwatersrand with the gold reserves. During this period mining became the new dominant industry. Having abolished slavery and provided concessions to the natives, it became difficult to source cheap labour necessary for profitable mining. Some of the concessions previously granted to farm-working slaves were the following:
- Sunday became a day of rest.
- The number of hours the slaves could be made to work was limited.
- Slaves had to receive a reasonable amount of food, shelter and clothing.
- Wives and husbands could not be separated and children could not be sold before a certain age.
- Slaves were granted property rights. Slaves who worked in their free time could save what they earned and buy freedom for themselves and their families — even against the wishes of the owner.
This posed a deep challenge to the possibility of a highly profitable mining industry emerging. For the mining industry to take off, the wages needed to be extremely low, native men would have to leave their family homes and work long hours in unsafe conditions. For these profits to be sustained, as many men as possible were required. Despite having earned and bought your freedom, this new industry obliged that you grant your labour. To ensure this, the state did absurd things such as; introducing unreasonable taxes on natives for owning land. Failure to pay these taxes could result in imprisonment. The catch was that the natives in the villages didn’t have money. They lived from the land, planted food and used whichever natural resources they had to build and survive. They were being set up to become imprisoned. There was, however, an escape. These land tax laws stated that if you worked in the cities for a few months you would be exempt from paying this tax. The state engineered a system that would ensure that they always had cheap black labour to work in the mines. All of this was pioneered by John Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony at the time, through the introduction of the Glen Grey Act of 1894.
As the discovery of coal and platinum in other regions later emerged, more cheap labour was required. Hugh Masekela reminds us that these labourers were also sourced from Namibia and Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland. From all the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa. Immigration and a series of apartheid laws became essential to reinstitute the conditions that created cheap black labour in South Africa. These laws included examples such as The Masters and Servants Acts of 1856, The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 and The Mines and Works Act (Colour Bar Act) of 1926. There was evidently a pattern of disenfranchising workers of everything they could accumulate and needed to survive. It kept changing form and finding ways to reinvent itself despite the resistance of the labourers. Once with wars of dispossession, then later with acts and legislation. One wonders what form it has taken in today’s world…
What was common was the labourer’s dissatisfaction with either his conditions, his wage or usually both. In modern-day South Africa, technology, immigration and the growing unemployed labour pool, all seem to undermine his ability to negotiate his way out of these circumstances. Upward mobility as a labourer was and still is usually achieved through gaining new skills or furthering your education. However, the Bantu education system ensured to limit the potential of the natives. Having dedicated their entire lives to work and improving their conditions, many struggled to beat the apartheid system and alleviate themselves and their children out of the cycle of poverty. The cheap-black-labourer could barely afford an education to secure their children a spot in a better sector of society which absorbs the skilled and educated individuals. The inability to access quality education then stripped the children of the labourer an opportunity to transform and improve their lives. If by some miracle they got a decent education, some other form of discrimination would catch up with them along the way.
What further exacerbates this challenge today is the abnormally high unemployment rates. This unemployment is structural. You will recall in our introductory essay that we introduced the idea of stages of growth and how the type of job opportunities change across various stages and economic sectors. In the early stages of a traditional society, there were many jobs in the primary sectors, however, this shifted over time as progression along the stages to the last stage of mass consumption occurred. These final stages require relatively few labourers and sophisticated skills in their tertiary and quaternary sectors. The stage in which the country finds itself has a huge bearing on the structure of the economy and employment patterns. This affects the number and types of jobs required, which influences the levels of skill required. Higher skills, higher sector, higher output and higher wages.
Wages are another crucial aspect of growth and development. As the labourers master their trade, they improve their productivity by becoming efficient at using tools and machines to produce goods and services. The increased wages are not only an aspect of fair compensation but are also necessary to balance the scales. For instance, if the production of goods and services suddenly increases, this would imply an oversupply whose demand does not correlate. This is because the people who are meant to be consumers are also the labourers. So if their wages cannot afford the goods and services they produce, despite having increased production, the company will face the challenge of having no market to sell to. For this reason, hoarding wealth away from the labourers may lead to self-destruction because it also affects the market of consumers.
Henry Ford realised this when he discovered the assembly line at his Ford Motor Company factory. Ford had an arrangement of workers and machines in a factory, where each worker deals with only one part of a product opposed to each worker manufacturing each vehicle alone from start to finish. Through this, he was able to dramatically increase production whilst decreasing the cost of production. He went from producing a vehicle i n 12 hours to 1 hour 30 minutes. In the same time he used to produce 1 vehicle, he could now produce 8 vehicles. The labour was more intensive and very monotomous so workers felt overburdened by it, hence he needed to increase the incentive. This was the cost he would have to pay for dramatically increasing labour productivity. To retain employees, Ford proposed to increase the employee wage rate to nearly double despite his shareholder’s refusal. Some even took him to court because they wanted higher dividends but Hendry Ford insisted. The upside of increased wages was that his employees could afford his vehicles. The car also became cheaper because of more efficient production and reduced overall labour cost (although the rate doubled, the hours per unit were reduced to an eighth, so the total cost of labour overall shrunk). Ford’s Labour force became the biggest ambassadors of his vehicle and could tell you all about it because they had made it themselves.
The reason South Africa was able to get away with suppressing wages is because the major businesses such as mining, agriculture and banking were an extension of colonialism and imperialism. It was not about developing a South African economy, it was about establishing corporations for extracting resources. Those resources would not need a South African market because they were meant to be exported in any case. It’s pretty much in your face, ANGLO-AMERICA (anglo means a white English-speaking person of British or northern European origin), LONDON MINE (LONMIN) RHODES food group(RFG), NEDERLANDSCHE BANK(Nedbank). They have since gotten a lot better at hiding which interests they serve; at times even incorporating African languages into their company names. The development of South Africa would defeat their goal because if it were to succeed, the labourers would then demand higher wages. If you doubt this you should check out what happened in Marikana. Mine workers were killed for demanding a higher wage whilst the company was shifting profits to tax havens.
This issue of wages is more of a class issue. Black or white, the class struggle does not discriminate. Unless of course, someone tells it to. As these class struggles started to affect the white Afrikaners, the government became concerned. In 1932 they commissioned a study titled “The Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission.” They were concerned that the poverty of white people and how their integration into the lived experiences of black people would undermine the ideas of white supremacy. Any evidence of white mediocrity, white illiteracy, white poverty and white joblessness had to be masked, concealed or uplifted to uphold white supremacy. The President of the Carnegie Corporation in his own words wrote that there was “little doubt that if the Bantu were given full economic opportunity, the more competent among them would soon outstrip the less competent Whites.”
From there they established job reservations, segregated black and white towns, allowed for white labour to become unionised and introduced minimum wage laws for white people. The mining bosses did not care about race because they preferred cheaper labour, however, the government went to whatever lengths to ensure that they were paid more for doing the same work and held more senior positions despite being underqualified or less experienced. They would incur whatever cost necessary to sustain this fallacy of white supremacy. The state even began infrastructure projects to employ white people and used state-owned companies and agencies to absorb them. These interventions came together to rescue white labour from the class struggles that black people were forced to contend with.
The lack of clarity in defining challenges relating to labour within the economy today is precisely part of this labour problem. Are the people not skilled enough? Perhaps too lazy? Are they asking for too much money? Have they not adapted to the so-called modern economy? This kind of confusion about the labour problem becomes ideal for blame shifting and further compromise on the part of the labourer. What we have established is that the room for exploitation seems to exist precisely between the native and his aspiration to reacquire his land with all its accessories. The hope to escape the damnation of being a labourer has time after time proven to be near impossible. This is not because there is anything wrong with the labourers but because the system needs them. It needs him to be dirt-poor, debt-ridden and desperate.
In next week’s essay we can look at what distinguishes the Entrepreneur from the labourer; and what makes them so special and worthy of the power and authority vested in them.
