so-called New Growth Path? By its own description, its ‘newness’ lies in its development of a model for economic growth in which ‘labour absorption’ (in the form of the long-term goal of ‘decent work’) becomes central. However, as Eddie Webster points out in his chapter in this volume, decent work is a goal that predates the NGP, stretching far back in the history of the ANC Alliance and originating in the policies of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the late 1990s. Hardly, then, something new. However, what is new about its prioritisation in the NGP is its linking of economic growth to job creation as a new development path and, as such, it calls, for example, for state interventions to promote private sector investment in job creation, in particular in sectors of the economy.
Webster also outlines in his chapter the fact that the NGP’s proposals for a new growth model conceptualise ‘decent work’ as a long-term goal whose only practical realisation will come about through short-term participation by the unemployed in created ‘opportunities’ for work that will help in developing their skills and discipline for promised ‘decent work’ some time in the future. Such ‘opportunities’ will continue to include the short-term contract jobs provided through the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), and new jobs (lower paying, and targeted at youth) to be created through subsidies provided to the private sector, as well as Community Work Programmes (CWP) through which state funds will provide low-paying work opportunities for a hundred days a year per person for the unemployed members of targeted communities.
Webster presents such a model as the only practical alternative, given the present character of the South African economy and labour market, and argues for the union movement and the private sector to accept the logic that the progressive realisation of decent work is the only possible solution to South Africa’s crisis of unemployment and low growth rate. In this call, the private sector is asked to concede that certain forms of labour legislation and protection are necessary for the upholding of certain norms and standards of ‘decency’ and ‘dignity’; and organised labour to concede that decent work in its proper sense (that is, full-time, permanent, secure waged employment) is only realisable in the long-term through its ‘progressive realisation’. He adds, however, that such an approach has to begin by addressing government inefficiencies in implementing policy decisions.
Some critiques of the ‘decent-work’ model open the NGP’s and Webster’s position to debate. Franco Barchiesi (2009: 52), for example, argues that while South Africa’s history boasts a rich collection of working-class struggles that ‘actively subverted waged work, both through direct refusal or through workers’ unwillingness to confine their claims to productivity requirements, a powerful disciplinary narrative has now emerged to celebrate the ‘dignity of work’ as a disciplinary construct that marginalises, stigmatises and criminalises specific categories identified as disruptive of wage labour discipline’. He argues that after apartheid, a revived discourse of the dignity of work ‘came to depict a virtuous condition of active citizenship rightfully enabling the full, practical enjoyment of formal, on-paper constitutional rights’. Barchiesi writes:
As work becomes the normative premise of virtuous citizenship, it provides an epistemic device with which South African society can be ‘known’ as an objective, socially ascertainable hierarchy ordered according to the seemingly natural, immutable laws of the labour market … At the pinnacle of such a hierarchical order stands a by now largely imaginary, patriotic, respectable, hard working, socially moderate, conflict-averse, deracialised worker as the virtuous citizen of democratic South Africa. Precisely as a creation of official imagination, however, such a subject indicates the practical conducts the poor have to follow, as workers-in-waiting, on their path to actual citizenship: avoid complaining, stay away from social conflicts, and actively seek ‘employment opportunities’ available in poverty wage schemes of mass precariousness like the EPWP. (Barchiesi, 2009:52).
In this way, the framing of the NGP as a commitment to the progressive realisation of decent work as an ultimate goal for the transformation of the South African economy (and society) could be read as an exercise in producing the discipline and control required for the functioning of a capitalist society in which full-time, waged employment is on the decline.
In this volume, Malose Langa and Karl von Holdt present the experience of a Community Work Programme (CWP) in the poverty-stricken community of Bokfontein in the North West province as a lesson in how work opportunities can shape a collective project through which trauma (related to past and present events) can be addressed and the potential threat of violence averted, while simultaneously providing spaces through which unemployed individuals are able to alleviate their poverty, and gain access to skills and/or experiences that potentially assist them in securing decent work.3 Langa and Von Holdt argue that the implementation of the CWP in Bokfontein has negated the need for service delivery protests, illustrating how good leadership bolstered by a facilitated process of democratic engagement among community members might have assisted in allowing participants to imagine themselves and their community differently from other communities in which service delivery protests have arisen. They express uncertainty, however, as to whether the tensions and cleavages that persist at the community level can be overcome without the continued assistance of external NGOs, and whether conditions generally will allow for the social cohesion that has characterised the Bokfontein experience to continue over time.
While they raise questions about the long-term sustainability of such projects, they nevertheless propose that the rollout of CWPs throughout poor communities in South Africa would be a worthwhile investment on the part of the state, even at an estimated cost of R10 billion for each one million jobs created. For them, the CWP initiative (currently consisting of fifty-six impoverished communities receiving assistance from the president’s office in the form of material resources and the support of NGOs)4 includes those excluded from waged labour in forms of work through which they are able to continue with the meeting of their basic needs in their everyday lives, and to stay committed to finding waged employment in the long-term, while at the same time contributing to a collective project of community building and development. They also suggest the potential for alternative imaginings of work (and relationships to labour) among those constrained by their lack of access to waged labour. For example, their narration of how some CWP members view their work in the project differently from that done on farms because it is ‘work done for the community’ signifies a potential for a very different approach to work unfolding amongst these individuals.
What distinguishes the Bokfontein experience from other initiatives such as the EPWPs is that it has been coordinated by NGOs external to the community (such as Seriti) which have been able to develop a methodology for facilitating collective processes of decision making and conflict resolution in relation to the CWP. This seems to have allowed for the collective identification of community needs and priorities, and the collective meeting of these priority needs through different work projects. While there seems to be the potential for such collective discussions and decision-making processes to re-imagine how work is given value, how it is organised, how its products are distributed and so on, the manner in which the CWP is currently structured and framed and the fact that it forms part of a national programme of decent work imagined as waged labour, means that any such potentials are foreclosed as waged labour is already prescribed as the solution to the problem – the problem of how to meet one’s basic needs, and not necessarily the problem of not having employment. Langa and Von Holdt, however, note that not all community members chose to participate in the CWP, and the question must be asked how else – outside the CWP and outside formal employment – other unemployed members of the Bokfontein settlement survive. While the experience of Bokfontein, as narrated by Langa and Von Holdt, provides a compelling case for how work can function as a successful means of social inclusion, and as the containment of any threats to social cohesion, it is important to ask what voices, experiences and approaches the imposition of such a work-centred
