THE current debate in South Africa about a minimum wage misses a most
important point, says Terry Bell in his latest Labour Wrap. That is that a
minimum wage caters only for the steadily diminishing numbers of men and women
who will find work in the future.
Unfortunately, this concentration, both by business and labour on
established work and wages, also tends largely to ignore the seriousness of the
situation. But there are signs that this
is changing.
For example, South Africa’s richest man, Johann Rupert, in an interview last week noted: “We are in for some bad and dangerous times.” These, he said, would be caused not only by the increase in the wage and welfare gap, but also by the growth “in the ranks of the unemployable”.
Bell maintains that it is not only a lack of skills that is making more and
more people unemployable; that all that is required is retraining and
upskilling. Many men and women with skills, he says, are increasingly finding
that their skills are becoming redundant.
As the march of automation continues, many more millions of people around the
world will find it impossible to find work. According to one current estimate,
for every productive process that is automated, 60 jobs are lost.
This is a guarantee of instability, of “bad and dangerous times”. But now one major trade union, Britain’s
largest, Unite, has proposed a “universal basic income” as a possible solution.
And in countries such as Finland and the Netherlands, an official debate has
begun about the provision of a “universal basic wage”.
This means governments providing a basic living wage to every citizen,
whether in work or not. And, as a Black Sash seminar in Johannesburg this month
revealed, social assistance to the destitute and poor has beneficial impacts
on society as a whole.
Bell asks if, in the present system, a universal basic income is possible. And, if it was, he wonders whether such a handout will be accepted in the longer term by many displaced working people.