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Votes for all - except those who work in retail

THE cashier in the Spar store serving this community has two hours to go before hometime, and she doesn’t look very happy. “Have you voted already?” I ask her.

“No.” She shakes her head. “No, it’s an ordinary working day for us.”

“You’re not going to be able to vote?”

“No.”

It’s a two-taxi trip to her home community, you see, and that’s too much to do in her lunch-hour. Her shift began too early to make it through the polling station before she left this morning, and ends too late to get back and do it at day’s end.

One of my friends asked the same question before polling day of the cashier at her local Woolworths, and heard that staff had asked for time off to vote, and been told: “This isn’t a charity.”

This isn’t fair to the chains and franchises concerned, since I’m hearing all of this second- and third-hand, and experience tells me that there’s very often a layer of explanation or meaning that’s not being conveyed.

But I feel indignant, nevertheless, that once every two years (at most) we get to exercise our vote, and many of the people working in retail can’t use the privilege.

For most of them, as the Spar cashier illustrates, this will be because of apartheid geography. That ugly strategy, of sticking black people in dormitory townships far from the centre of things and the white suburbs, is one of the most irritatingly persistent features of apartheid, something that’s very hard to unscramble.

The result is that work is all too often kilometres away, at the end of a complex and time-consuming trip using trains, shank’s pony, taxis and buses. I’m not sure that many bosses fully grasp the debilitating and demanding nature of these journeys – I know I would be tired by the time I arrived at work if I had to do a two- or three-hour, multiple-transport-mode trip to get there. 

All bosses should be required to make these journeys for at least a week, to get a visceral understanding of their staff’s lived experience.

This, by the way, is my beef with the CEO Sleepout: it did not require this kind of genuine, lived encounter with either the reality of sleeping on the streets (I’ve yet to meet a homeless person as thoroughly polar-fleeced and arctic-downed as those CEOs were) or the real personalities of the homeless.

I believe the CEOs had to bring along an underprivileged student – who I am sure would have been carefully selected, clothed and groomed for the occasion, possibly by the PR agency employed to curate the CEO’s brand. That’s a different kettle of fish from an up-close-and-personal encounter with someone who’s been out of work and money, and sleeping under the bridge for months or years.

On the Sleepout website landing page is this: “Transformation happens when we move beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’ to ‘we’, and begin to understand that our entire world is yearning for positive change.”

Yes. I completely agree. But this is not how you achieve that. The only route towards caring, really caring, is exactly that shift from ‘us’ and ‘them’ to ‘we’ – and it happens free, gratis and for nothing when people from the rich side of the tracks stumble into the real world of the people on the other side.

I’ve seen this happen: someone I know encountered a person with artistic talent on the side of the road, selling his art. He thought perhaps he could make a bit of money out of buying up the art and selling it on – at the same time supporting the artist by buying him materials and, of course, paying for a sheaf of art every month.

This plan took him into the heart of a large township, where the artist lived in a lean-to he rented. Within a very few months, he had lost his fear of townships, developed an appreciation of township culture, and a non-patronising respect for and better understanding of the people living there.

Instead of a manufactured encounter, he had had an authentic and unfiltered encounter with real people, and it changed his perspective in a bone-deep way. I have seen this experience repeated many times, in different ways – it’s often not the planned and polished corporate social responsibility thing that does the trick, it’s the accidental sideways slip into a true face-to-face that shifts perspective, like a kaleidoscope being shaken and twisted… and all of sudden ‘us’ and ‘them’ really do become ‘we’.

Back to the vote: it’s not a real democracy if a significant chunk of the vote is not being exercised by people who’re in retail. They’re at work to serve the office worker, who often lives a two-minute-drive from his polling station, so he can queue for an hour and then braai till sundown (because he pops into the shop for tjops on his way home, his credit card accepted by a worker who hasn’t had the chance to make her cross yet). That’s not right.

Next time we have a polling day, the buying public should insist on an accounting from their local shops as to how they made it possible for their staff to vote: staggered shifts, longer lunch hours, a mini-bus running them home in relays, heavens to Betsy! even a real day off!

The vote is not all there is to democracy, but it’s hard-won and precious enough to take some extraordinary measures to ensure we can all have our say if we want to.

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.

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