Jeremy Seekings

• University of Cape Town

Wage regulation in South Africa’s clothing industry has pushed low-wage producers to restructure themselves as partnerships between former employers, now intermediaries, and worker cooperatives. The proliferation of employer-initiated cooperatives in the clothing sector reflects and poses challenges to South Africa’s system of industrial-level barg...

This chapter examines how two former British territories—South Africa and Botswana—followed quite different paths toward an apparently similar system of social protection, focused on social assistance programs. South Africa’s adoption of social assistance programs was shaped by ideas and models from Britain (as well as Australia and New Zealand), b...

Basic income activists have kept the idea of basic income on the edge of the policy-making agenda in South Africa for more than twenty years, but proposals have not gained significant support within the policy-making and political elite. Nor has the idea served to mobilise popular support. Crucially, both public and elite opinion remains opposed to...

The proliferation of social cash transfers (SCTs) across much of sub-Saharan Africa since the mid-2000s resulted from interactions between international organizations and national governments. In this chapter we employ Tania Li’s framework on how development ideas travel to understand the political economic context for the rising enthusiasm for tra...

Categorically-targeted social assistance programmes have considerable potential to reduce poverty and buttress the dignity of disadvantaged groups of people, but they can also generate tensions over financial support and care within households and families. This is especially likely in contexts in the global South where landlessness and unemploymen...

Because redistribution concerns ‘who gets what and from whom’, redistributive conflicts revolve around ‘who should get what and from whom’. Individuals as well as states distinguish between deserving and undeserving claimants. People may favour people they know over strangers, kin over non-kin, or some kin over other kin. This paper uses data from...

Chapter 3 argues that the ILO’s decent work agenda is insensitive to the needs of countries with high unemployment. We identify thirteen developing countries whose unemployment rate in 2016 was over twice the mean for low- and middle-income countries. Most are war-torn, post-communist, and unfree. However, for a set of Southern African countries, h...

W. Arthur Lewis, the founding father of development economics, saw developing economies as dualist, that is, characterised by differences in earnings and productivity between and within economic sectors. His famous model of development, in which ‘surplus’ (unemployed and underemployed) labour was drawn out of subsistence activities and into manufac...

Chapter 8 considers the challenge of moving towards inclusive dualism for surplus labour countries. In such countries, decent work fundamentalism threatens to perpetuate or worsen poverty and inequality. As the extreme case of South Africa’s clothing manufacturing sector shows, decent work fundamentalism not only impedes job creation but it also de...

Chapter 4 provides a history and analysis of development trajectories in the global clothing industry. Trade liberalization (specifically the end of import quotas from January 2005) and the rise of global value chains have changed the nature of the global economy since Lewis’s time. We use UNIDO data on remuneration, output, and employment to ident...

Chapter 2 discusses the Lewis model of development with surplus labour and the ongoing relevance of his dualist approach as demonstrated in the industrialization of Hong Kong, India, Bangladesh, etc. We show, using examples from the South African clothing manufacturing industry, that relatively high- and low-wage firms exist in the same industry by...

Chapter 5 considers the debate over ‘sweatshops’ in the clothing manufacturing industry, arguing that the moral economy of rival positions entails different understandings of the relationship between wages, profits, and employment. Many contemporary arguments reflect those made over a century earlier in Britain and the US. However, whereas the Brit...

Chapter 6 reviews the history of collective bargaining in the South African clothing manufacturing industry. We show that its profoundly dualist character (high- and low-productivity firms co-existing) has historical and market-related roots and highlight the role of wage policy during and after apartheid in shaping the regional location of firms....

Chapter 7 argues that the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU) strategy was complicated by its dual role as a trade union and investment manager. Having taken advantage of investment opportunities provided through ‘black economic empowerment policies’ to grow substantial financial assets and later also direct investments in...

Bob Deacon’s study of the Social Protection Floors initiative, led by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), entailed a pioneering study of the making of global social policy. Just how global is this ‘global social policy’ in terms of both its making and its subsequent diffusion? African governments were minimally involved in the making of th...

Clothing production increasingly occurs in global value chains. Industrial policies typically recommend ‘upgrading’ (increasing labour productivity by becoming more skill- and capital-intensive and producing higher valued products) yet firms can and do move up and down the value chain when profitable opportunities arise. This paper uses United Nati...

Political elites across much of Africa have criticized welfare programmes and the idea of a welfare state for fostering dependency. Anxiety over dependency is not unique to East or Southern Africa, but the discourse of dependency in countries such as Botswana differs in important respects to the discourses of dependency articulated in some industri...

Contemporary development strategies emphasise labour productivity growth because it has historically underpinned rising living standards. Today, however, poverty reduction and inclusive development in those developing countries with high unemployment require increasing the employment rate even if this means lower average labour productivity. We cri...

Grace Davie. Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855–2005. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. x + 334 pp. List of Figures. Acknowledgments. Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Cloth. No price reported. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-521-19875-2 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-107-55173-2 (African edition paperback). - Volume 60 Issue...

What should states in the developing world do and how should they do it? How have states in the developing world addressed the challenges of promoting development, order, and inclusion? States in the developing world are supposed to build economies, control violence, and include the population. How they do so depends on historical origins and conte...

KEITH BRECKENRIDGE, Biometric State: the global politics of identification and surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £69.99 – 978 1 107 07784 3). 2014, xi + 252 pp. - Volume 86 Issue 3 - JEREMY SEEKINGS

In 2015, the South African Government, organised business and organised labour agreed to the introduction of a national minimum wage (NMW) in principle, but without any agreement over the level at which it should be set. One of the key arguments for a high NMW is that the experiences of other countries (including especially Brazil and Germany) supp...

Felix started work as a gardener for a semi-private school in Cape Town in the 1980s. In 1994, he was living in a shack, in Imizamo Yethu, a largely unserviced ‘informal settlement’ in the Hout Bay valley. Soon after, his shack burnt down when a fire swept through the settlement, forcing him to rebuild and refurnish. In 2014, twenty years after the...

Poverty and inequality after 1994 were rooted in the labour market, in very high unemployment and highly unequal earnings among working people. The last traces of an independent peasantry had been destroyed under apartheid, and by the 1990s subsistence agriculture was making only an insignificant contribution to aggregate welfare (although it did r...

In the 2000s, poor urban areas across South Africa were the sites of a wave of protests over service delivery, housing and political representation. This ‘rebellion of the poor’ (Alexander, 2010) reflected a ‘society’ that was ‘seething with fury’ (Bond, 2014: 1). Protests were almost always focused on immediate, local issues, although implicitly (...

Education, health care, housing, electricity, water and other essential services can be provided through the market or by the state, and sometimes through kin. The poor typically have little or no access to these through the market because they are poor. Their kin are often as poor as them, and unable to assist. Hence the need for state interventio...

The welfare state was integral to the Polanyian counter-movement against market commodification, especially in north-west Europe between the 1920s and 1970s. Welfare states typically entailed public education, health care and housing (discussed in Chapter 7) and direct income support (discussed in this chapter). The latter entailed stark de commodi...

Relationships between trade unions, the state and capital in South Africa have changed dramatically, especially in the clothing sector. The clothing workers’ union became heavily dependent on its political alliances with the governing party, not only for the regulation of wages and industrial policies, but also for Black Economic Empowerment polici...

Public policy in post-apartheid South Africa has been characterized by a mix of state regulation and ‘neo-liberalism’. This article argues that this mix is rooted in the model of economic modernity adopted in South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, and underpinned by the institutions of a modern state. In an economy transformed by mining and subsequen...

Neoliberal states require some capacity, most obviously to protect property rights, but social democratic states require a much wider range of capacities, to protect workers against exploitation and consumers against abuse, to raise taxes from the rich and to provide public services and income support to citizens, especially poor citizens. The like...

The analysis of the post-apartheid political economy in terms of ‘neoliberalism’ attaches considerable importance to the power of business, both foreign and domestic. Poverty persisted, in this view, because business compelled or co-opted the ANC into jettisoning pro-poor socialist policies and implementing instead pro-business, free market policie...

Poverty persisted after 1994 despite steady economic growth and the growing affluence of the rich. This was despite the fact that, under democracy, poverty was on the political and intellectual agenda in ways that were almost unimaginable under apartheid. Massive resources and effort were invested in the collection and analysis of data on poverty,...

Poverty persisted in South Africa after 1994 because economic growth was neither rapid nor pro-poor. For the whole of the period from 1994 to 2014, the South African economy achieved positive growth (with the exception of 2008–9). Real gross national income per capita rose by a total of 31 percent between 1994 and 2013. Even with the highest povert...

Poverty persisted over the first twenty years of democracy despite rising GDP per capita, rising earnings for most working people in formal employment, dramatic increases in the earnings of the rich and greatly improved opportunities for many black South Africans. Continuing poverty — and, conversely, affluence and upward mobility — are often exami...

Poverty persisted and inequality worsened in South Africa after democratization in 1994. Despite confident assertions by both the ANC and its critics, and an abundance of data, it is difficult to pinpoint precisely the trend in income poverty. Both the ANC and government and their critics use data selectively. It seems likely, however, that poverty...

There is considerable debate over the causes of violence around the world, one which goes beyond the analysis of conflict to consider the dynamics of community behavior and the importance of economic and behavioral factors. One of the most interesting countries to study is South Africa, where violence seems to have increased rather than declined si...

Inequalities are stark and obvious in post-apartheid South Africa. How to analyse inequalities, however, is far less clear. In Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa (Seekings and Nattrass 2005), we combined original analysis of quantitative data with critical use of a wide range of secondary historical, anthropological and sociological studies...

The cohort of young people born between the early 1980s and early 1990s consitute a demographic bulge in the South African population. The sheer size of this cohort renders it especially important in terms of the changing political, economic, and social life of the country. The cohort grew up for the most part after apartheid had ended, entered the...

From its establishment in 2002, the National Bargaining Council for the Clothing Manufacturing Industry (NBC) was used by the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU) and mostly Cape Town-based employers to raise wages in lower-wage areas, including Newcastle. Rising minimum wages were agreed in the NBC, and then extended countrywi...

Dans l’Afrique du Sud d’après-apartheid, l’égalité politique formelle coexiste avec un haut niveau d’inégalité économique. La déracialisation du marché du travail et les politiques d’aide sociale qui favorisaient les blancs sous le régime de l’apartheid n’ont mené à aucune diminution de l’inégalité en général. Ceci est dû en partie au fait que ces...

This article contributes methodologically and substantively to the debate over the importance of poverty, sexual behaviour and circumcision in relation to HIV infection, using panel data on young black men and women in Cape Town, South Africa. Methodological challenges included problems of endogeneity and blunt indicator variables, especially for t...

ABSTRACT The South African government has delivered many low-cost houses under freehold homeownership, in part on the assumption that neighbourhoods of homeowners will result in economically and socially viable communities. Drawing on qualitative data collected from four new poor neighbourhoods in post-apartheid Cape Town (South Africa), this artic...

The reconfiguration of urban politics in Brazil over the past twenty-five or so years has attracted widespread scholarly attention. ‘Participatory budgeting’ and related institutions and procedures have provided for new forms of participatory and deliberative democracy, transforming the local public realm. At the same time, popular struggles over l...

The recent striking expansion across Latin America of two forms of social assistance - conditional cash transfers and social pensions – represents a new approach in that region to the challenge of universalizing social welfare and social citizenship. From the 1940s until the 1990s, it was generally imagined that universalism would be achieved throu...

The Apartheid City The Persistence of Inequality after Apartheid The Persistence of Segregation Decommodification References

Violence is a serious problem in South Africa with many effects on health services; it presents complex research problems and requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Two key meta-questions emerge: (i) violence must be understood better to develop effective interventions; and (ii) intervention research (evaluating interventions, assessing efficacy...

South African government ministers routinely profess their commitment to mitigating poverty and inequality, including — if necessary — through broad and expensive welfare programmes. The South African state redistributes approximately 3.5 percent of GDP through non-contributory social-assistance programmes, paying out in 2010 more than 13 million g...

People in violent neighbourhoods attribute violence in public spaces to, especially, poverty and unemployment, but agree that social disintegration, disrespect, drinking and drugs and the weaknesses of the criminal justice system also contribute substantially. However, data from a panel of young men in Cape Town provide little support for the hypot...

Randomized clinical trials have shown that medical male circumcision substantially reduces the risk of contracting HIV. However, relatively little is known about the relationship between traditional male circumcision and HIV risk. This article examines variations in traditional circumcision practices and their relationship to HIV status. We used da...

The end of apartheid in South Africa has not led to widespread racial desegregation and racial integration. Racial segregation and antipathy appear to have deep and enduring roots. There has been some racial desegregation in middle-class or elite neighbourhoods, due to the rapid upward mobility of some ‘African’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’ people, but...

The South African economy experienced substantial growth and change over the twentieth century. By the time of Union in 1910, gold mining on the Witwatersrand had already and rapidly transformed what had been a peripheral agricultural economy into one that was industrialising around mineral exports. Gold attracted British capital and immigrants fro...

Mauritius's unusual welfare state dates back to the introduction of non-contributory old-age pensions in 1950. This article examines the origins of this reform, focusing on the interactions between political actors in both Mauritius (local planters, political activists, and the colonial government) and London (the Colonial Office and Labour Party)....

By comparison with most African countries, post-apartheid South Africa appears to be characterised by growth‐oriented cooperation between state and business. Economic growth has remained weak, however, and income poverty persists as the economy continues down an inegalitarian growth path that fails to reduce unemployment and thus has little effect...

Looking back from the 2000s at urban politics in South Africa in previous decades, observers are struck by both the continuities and the changes. On the one hand, as Doreen Atkinson has written, ‘for a “Rip van Winkel” who had fallen asleep in 1988 and awoken in 2005, it might appear as if the “rolling mass action” of the end-of-apartheid period ha...

The transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa, marked above all by the election in 1994 of a government led by the African National Congress (ANC) and headed by President Nelson Mandela, represented a milestone not only for South Africa but for Africa generally. The transition meant the end of formal colonial or settler rule in Africa....

In multiracial or otherwise multicultural societies, people may discriminate in the allocation of scarce resources against members of particular racial or cultural groups. This chapter examines how people in postapartheid South Africa assess the desert of others in terms of access to social assistance from the state and employment opportunities. It...

Depuis la fin de l’apartheid, l’Afrique du Sud reste « racialisée » d’un point de vue culturel et social, et inégale en termes de revenus et d’opportunités. L’intégration demeure faible, notamment dans les champs de l’éducation et de l’emploi, malgré l’amélioration des rapports entre groupes raciaux. L’inégalité économique semble désormais moins le...

The study of the ‘liberation’ struggle in South Africa is unusual in that, with respect to the final phase of struggle in the 1980s, the literature was dominated by an ‘indigenous’ scholarship produced in whole or in part inside the country and, initially, during rather than after the period of struggle. This article examines three phases in this i...

How has the end of apartheid affected the experiences of South African children and adolescents? This pioneering study provides a compelling account of the realities of everyday life for the first generation of children and adolescents growing up in a democratic South Africa. The authors examine the lives of young people across historically divided...

Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. By Haggard Stephan and Kaufman Robert R.. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 502p. $80.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. - Volume 7 Issue 4 - Jeremy Seekings

The hegemony of Marxist approaches to the study of stratification in South Africa has obscured the prominence of Weberian contributions between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Some of these Weberian studies focused on the nascent black middle class, paying particular attention to the importance of status. Others, influenced by the literature on...

By the late 1930s, South Africa had developed a welfare state that was remarkable in terms of both the range of risks against which it provided and its coverage of the poor – although only for poor white and coloured people. The Carnegie Commission of Inquiry into the Poor White Problem in South Africa is often credited with the major role in promp...

This article examines how racial differences affect perceptions of distributive justice in post-apartheid South Africa. In ‘divided’ societies, citizens might be expected to discriminate on the basis of race or culture in assessing the justice of other citizens’ claims. South Africa is a prime example of a ‘divided’ society in which, in the past, l...

The end of apartheid has brought a resurgence of research into racial identities, attitudes and behaviour in South Africa. The legacy of systematic racial ordering and discrimination under apartheid is that South Africa remains deeply racialised, in cultural and social terms, as well as deeply unequal, in terms of the distribution of income and opp...

The constitution charges the government with the progressive realisation of the right of impoverished citizens to income security. In practice, this means that the government must have a reasonable defence of the current size and shape of its social assistance and social insurance programmes. Legal challenges have forced the state into providing su...

In 1937–38 Barbados introduced old-age pensions for its poor, black population. This radical innovation – the first in a British colony – occurred in Barbados as part of a slow movement towards social (as well as political) reform, driven by a combination of reformist colonial officials and an emergent black political leadership against the opposit...

The origins of South Africa's distinctive welfare state lay in the late 1920s, not in the 1930s as has generally been suggested, and long predated the quite different turn to social welfare in late colonial Africa. For the National Party and Labour Party – partners in the coalition Pact Government of 1924–9 – non-contributory old-age pensions were...

Even after ten years of democratic government, South Africa remains an unusually unequal society. Inequalities in the distribution of incomes both reflect and reproduce inequalities of opportunity. Yet curiously little research has been conducted on what South Africans think about inequality, and their views on distributive justice. The limited ext...

Writing about young people – or the 'youth' – in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s was dominated by representations of them as either the 'heroes' or 'villains' of political struggle. During the political transition, young people attracted a rush of attention as the source of a series of supposed social 'problems'. In much of the rest of Af...

In many parts of the 'South - i.e. the 'developing' countries of the world - widespread poverty is linked to landlessness and unemployment. Two possible responses to such poverty are employment guarantee (or public works) programmes and cash transfers. In general, low-wage job creation is the preferred option of both elites and citizens, but in Sou...

The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the earl...

Voting behavior in most countries is shaped by voters’ social and economic positions. Social and economic changes therefore often have profound electoral implications, eroding support for some parties while improving opportunities for others. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, South African society has changed dramatically, with the rapid growth o...