Johannesburg - South African businesses are instituting creative measures to help staff cope with rocketing food and fuel prices.
Globally high food and fuel prices are causing street protests, countries like India to halt rice exports and Kenya to warn that from August it could begin facing food shortages - it has begun distributing free seed and fertiliser to farmers to stave off crisis.
In South Africa consumer-price inflation hit 9.4% year-on-year in February, with food price inflation acting as the largest contributor.
Food prices rose 14.1% year-on-year in February, up from 13.4% in January, due to huge increases in the prices of grain products, meat, milk, tea, coffee, sugar, cheese, eggs, vegetables, fish and other food products.
The use of food in biofuels, as an example, is a major contributor with the maize price rocketing 60% in South Africa alone last year.
Climate change, fewer agricultural producers especially in Africa where AIDS has decimated women who traditionally produce 90% of African food crops and growing consumption is applying pressures that some economists warn could last for at least five years.
In January, the Gordon Institute of Business gave every staff member a R1 000 food voucher and will repeat the exercise in June. Professor Nick Binedell, director of GIBS said they realised many staff were not coping with high inflation, but too, 'keeping up with the Joneses' had become a national syndrome that was seeing many staff battle to make ends meet.
"We're developing a module to help staff better manage their income." He said they had become concerned about staff overspending when they discovered that one administrative staff member had not sent her child to school this year because she could not afford it - despite a good salary.
"Another bought a Mercedes which was swallowing 40% of his take-home pay, we managed to help him get out of the deal but there is a problem with people overspending."
Murphy Morobe, CEO of Kagiso Trust Media shares Binedell's concern: "I assisted someone who had taken out four loans with the same bank, the first was to pay for a luxury item, the next was to help pay off the first loan and so it went."
Liza van Wyk, CEO of training company AstroTech said they were developing a course to assist delegates to better manage their personal finance, "after lots of requests from businesses who say staff are spending ridiculous amounts of money on items like shoes and furnishings and then can't afford taxi fare to get to work. Such over-expenditure also deepens the risk of fraud."
In her own company she recently awarded staff an extra R1 000 a month each to cover travelling costs because of a move to new headquarters in Parktown from their present offices in Edenvale. "We have a tight knit, valuable team and frankly I don't want to lose anyone because they can't manage high petrol and travelling costs."
Last month the price of unleaded petrol went up 61c to R8.25 a litre in Gauteng and R8.01 a litre at the coast, an increase of almost 30% year-on-year - in the same period last year unleaded petrol cost R5.99 a litre in Gauteng and R5.75 at the coast.
Cosatu has threatened mass action against high inflation - which economists warn is likely to rise another percentage point in June - and has called on government to freeze the prices of basic foods.
But economists warn such a step will see farmers stop producing.
Tony Twine of Econometrix has suggested Cosatu's annual call for double-digit wage increases is in itself inflationary.
- Fin24.com