Why is casualisation increasing in south africa

Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Recent developments in the organisation of production have led to the decline of wage employment across much of the world. Basic income must be embedded within a broader strategy of economic reform, aimed at increasing the social wage and improving working conditions. If the best people management practices of the formal economy were to be deployed in the informal economy, new avenues of stimulating economic and life empowerment may be opened.

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All Rights Reserved. In fact, one of the biggest areas for agency work was, and still is, the health sector private and public. Unsurprisingly, the number of employment agencies skyrocketed during Blair's years, to 10, by the beginning of his second term! Jobcentres were subcontracted to several of these agencies - like Manpower and Reed - which already provided agency work to , workers!

Subcontracting firms and "temp" agencies, in turn, were to expand their operations to the private sector. So for instance, car manufacturers like BMW, increasingly resorted to agency contracts. By in the Mini plant in Oxford, at least one third of the BMW workforce consisted of agency "temps" - and this is still the case today! In fact, it was Labour's drive against the unemployed, which made it possible for companies to find a cheap and flexible workforce - what Blair called a "flexible labour market" - and for the capitalist classes to boost its profits.

Blair first proceeded to soften up the resistance of the jobless against taking low-paid jobs. Already the length of time the jobless could get paid benefits had been significantly reduced by the Tories by replacing the old unemployment benefit with the so-called Job Seekers' Allowance.

Blair went one step further, with the introduction of the "New Deal" in , a scheme supposedly designed to "help the unemployed into work".

Following in the footsteps of the previous Tory government's "Project Work", the New Deal forced workers into taking the first job on offer, by threatening to withdraw benefits from those who "refused reasonable employment". The government also attacked the so-called "economically inactive" workers - workers on incapacity benefits, disabled or with chronic conditions, lone parents and the long-term, older jobless workers, etc. This was how Labour forced hundreds of thousands of workers from poverty on the dole to poverty in lousy non-jobs.

The era of "high employment" but what kind of employment! After the return of the crisis in the s, the capitalist economy went on to limp from one crisis to the next. And British capital used each one of these crises as a pretext to turn the screw on the working class by another notch. So for instance, the number of workers on zero-hours contracts - a non-legal term for forms of employment which offer no guarantee as to the number of hours worked - has been skyrocketing. This category of contracts is, in fact, the formalisation of casual jobs that would have been considered, in the past, to be part of the "black economy" - when workers would get paid cash "off the books".

Since , the number of workers on such contracts has increased from , to ,, representing now 2. But as the Office for National Statistics itself admits, " there is no single agreed definition of what zero-hours contracts are. And of course, even this estimate doesn't take into account the number of workers who are still part of the "black economy"! Working conditions for agency workers have further deteriorated. So for instance, one of the examples of temporary contracts is the so-called Swedish Derogation Contract, which was invented by the bosses in response to a European directive aimed at regulating the employment of agency temporary workers by implementing equal pay for equal work.

Agencies were quick to find a loophole, discovered by the EU's Swedish delegation, which allowed bosses to by-pass equal pay rules even though these rules only applied after 12 weeks at work, anyway. So agencies can sign workers up to a "permanent" contract, which in reality offers temporary placements or "assignments". And if an assignment cannot be found, the agency can get away with paying workers only 1 day per week, usually at the minimum wage!

But even this minimal payment can be avoided by the agencies if a worker turns down an assignment or doesn't reply to it which can easily happen since offers are usually made by e-mail or SMS.

With all these "legal" possibilities available for exploitation, the use of agency workers has steadily increased, despite the EU's Agency Workers Regulations. Today, the number of agency workers has increased to , However, when adding to these all the short-term, casual and seasonal contracts which are, by definition, non-permanent contracts, the total number of workers concerned swells to 1.

Another category of employment that doesn't provide much guarantee on anything, including the number of paid hours, is self-employment. The number of those employed under such contracts has increased disproportionately when compared to any other category of jobs: in , 3. And there are good reasons why employers would rely upon self-employment.

Not only does it allow them to avoid having to pay What's more, unfair dismissal rules do not apply to the self-employed, and neither do health and safety regulations nor minimum wage or National Living Wage rules! As TUC General Secretary, Francis O'Grady explains: "Self-employment is, after all, behind the biggest change in our labour market since the financial crisis, accounting for nearly half of all employment growth since ".

Then, there are the additional tricks used by the bosses to undermine workers' employment rights. There is the creation of multiple tiers among the workforce.

The on-going drive against workers' pensions, is also just another way for the bosses to cut wages. And of course, the majority of non-permanent workers agency and others do not get the same access to occupational pension schemes as their permanent counterparts! Another way the bosses have responded to the crisis, at least in the first few years after , has been by cutting working hours, allegedly to "save jobs".

But the more some workers have their hours cut, the more others have to work even longer hours: today more than ever before, workers rely on working overtime or on second jobs to compensate for inadequate wages.

Apparently, ONS figures tell a different story, since they show a drop in the average overtime worked, from 1. Phelan ed. This seminar will start with a brief overview of how the global economic crisis has affected Southern Africa. For example, close to a million South African workers lost their jobs in and contemporary management prefers the practice of hiring workers on a casual basis with short-term contracts or through labour brokers, which further heightens employment insecurity.