Wage Inequality
Given the country’s poor economic outlook, employers are hardening their positions, citing the recession and South Africa’s looming junk status to dampen workers’ expectations for better wages and working conditions. In a challenging economic and political climate the South African workforce is persistently facing changing the work environment. South African workforce wants to live and work with dignity and have a sense of security for themselves and their children. The appeal “World class workers demand a living wage” means that it is not just wages that must increase, but working conditions that must improve too. Time and again at bargaining at the national level, South African workforce highlighted the challenges of meeting their monthly expenses. With food prices sky-rocketing, decent salary increases are going to be important for families to avoid reducing vital nutritional intake and worse, to ward off hunger. The year-on-year increase on the food basket from January 2015 to January 2016 was 14.6%. Similarly, the year-on-year increase in the price of electricity in February 2016 was 12.6% (Adams & Neumark, 2005). The major perspectives of South African workforce towards living wage are as follows:
From a cross-country perspective, the inequality of opportunity (and its ratio to overall inequality) is the highest in South Africa. South Africa is characterized by extreme wage inequality. While part of the population enjoys wages roughly equivalent to those living in developed economies, the lower-end wages are comparable to those in the poorest countries. High wage inequality is compounded by the heavy polarization between two extremes. The number of workers with high-end jobs is low, while a large fraction of the working population is employed in very low paid jobs (Bhorat, et al. 2012).
The other potential challenge faced by the workforce of the South African workforce for effective individual development. The South African organizations are unable of effective work design, creating job demand and physical resources which need to be effectively synchronized to enhance productivity and overall development. The effective synchronization of work design with innovation and creativity can influence the intrinsic motivating attitude and self-efficiency aspect of an employee. This process directly or indirectly empowers the proactive behaviour and flexible orientation of the workforce. According to Parker (2006), the proactive attitude can positively influence the motivation to innovate. The motivating attitude and self-efficiency aspect increase the tendency to be creative while performing a task. Through creativity and innovation, one can help in sustaining a significant equilibrium between preference, intricacy, and cooperation. According to researches, an organization should be flexible and malleable to manage the associated challenges to innovation and creativity. Although, the priority for the freedom to opt for new knowledge, experimentation and search in work design provides necessary thrust for promoting creativity and innovation (Bunyan, 2016).
Involvement and Participation
The Information Sharing and Knowledge Management have recognized the way to success and increase overall productivity or outcome. The lack of transparency in South African establishments requires exploration and exploitation characteristics for enhancing shared vision, enriched jobs, trust, culture, discipline and supportive leaders which are the essential elements requires for promoting development among the workforce. The ineffective human management, unconstructive evaluation and ineffective feedback system in the South African organization have ruined the integrity and efficiency of the workforce. This requires the supportive employer to effectively contribute to promoting overall development. According to researches, an organization should be flexible and malleable to manage the associated challenges to innovation and creativity. Although, the priority for the freedom to opt for new knowledge, experimentation and search in work design provides necessary thrust for promoting creativity and innovation. The increased competition and extensive globalization have effectively changed the existing process of business operation. The organizations in this competitive platform require more effective and advanced Knowledge Management to earn profitable outcome and for sustainable growth. In this regard, Knowledge Management plays a major role and helps in attaining more advanced and effective strategic implementations (Hightower, 2002).
South Africa is lacking in effective human resource management is set to control the segment of managing the employees of the organization. Human resource management helps the organization in selecting the employees for the organization according to the demands of the business organization. Strategic HR decisions are important for establishing the standards for each job role to define the competencies in the organisation. The proper management function handles the recruitment, interviews and the hiring to ensure that company is achiving its goals. It monitored the behaviour of the employees in the organization and helps them to adopt the working atmosphere of the organization. Human resource management performs functions by selecting the effective employees for the organization to maintain the work ethics in the business organization. Human resource management of an organization plays an important role in the business activities. The HRM of an organization makes a suitable working environment for the organization. The HRM follows ethical approach on selecting or promoting any employee in the organization. It helps the employees to understand their roles in the organization and clears the organization goals and perspective. Human resource management of an organization enhances the performance of the employee (Offner, 2013).
If we consider the approaches undertaken, the strategies or structured methodology employed mainly for promoting long-term sustainable growth. The lack of comprehensive programs in South African organizations makes them incapable to employs quality of management and implementation for sustainable growth. The organization need to consider innovation and creativity at every level of the operational process such as individual level, employee level, team level and organizational level. Effective training and development help in developing skills and the generation of innovative ideas. The trained HR managers take the responsibility at the team level and take the effective leadership approach to guide the team member for innovative idea generation and help to be more creative in the completion of a task. The supportive management and encouraging management practices of HRM ensure the process of promoting innovation within the organization. The structure and size of the organization perfectly accompany innovative work (Pippin, 2010).
Information Sharing and Knowledge Management
During the early 1980s, the issue of drawing up a living wage campaign became a leading item on the agenda of the South African labour movement. It developed as a response to pressure from the Congress Alliance for unions to formally adopt the living wage. Many within the labour movement felt that the living wage did not sufficiently cover the interests of workers.
COSATU campaign highlighted several issues according to the poster –unemployment, electricity, town services, education and housing as special areas for attention. The businessman and rich families that earn too much to qualify for government support and live a luxury life. Of course, the most important issue according to the poster capitalism and poverty. In this regard, the COSATU campaign demands a living wage (Tladinyane, 2017).
COSATU had formed in 1985 and from its inception had established itself as a giant of the labour movement. Its predecessor, the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU), followed a more worker approach to trade unionism, focussing largely on labour-related issues and building strong, worker controlled, democratic union affiliates. COSATU was formed to unify a wider range of unions and better strengthen worker struggles, but also as a means to contribute (in a political sense) more powerfully to the mass movement in the anti-apartheid struggle. COSATU would thus become the site through which the fight between workerism and populism would most strongly play out. And as a result of its sheer size and its growing political authority amongst the working class, decisions taken by COSATU would have a strong bearing on the direction of the labour movement and the mass movement as a whole (Wittenberg, 2016).
A living wage was proposed as a more radical alternative — one that would prioritise the interests of workers, or the working class more generally, and pave the way towards socialism. It is the minimum income which is important to meet the needs of the people. It includes the food, housing and the other essential needs like clothing. The goal is to focus on the living wage that allows the work to afford the basic and the decent standards of living. The flexible nature of the needs in COASTU varies from location and the household types. But possibly most importantly, it was the political implications of adopting the minimum wage that caused much of the scepticism from certain groups of trade unionists and workers. More specifically, this campaign called for the right to employment, decent housing, food and clothing. It also called for the right to free education and freedom of speech, association and movement (Tladinyane, 2017). By going beyond narrow workplace issues this living wage campaign was effectively a charter for the interests of the broader working class. But despite the progressive and even revolutionary nature, the approach was to negotiate for reforms to parliamentary laws, whereby they believed that the government would grant major concessions to the working class to protect itself against the potential growth of working-class militancy. This indeed became the case in many countries in the post-War years as the working class across much of the globe won major gains from their respective governments, leading to the establishment of “welfare states” (Tladinyane, 2017). However, with the rise to power of the National Party, it became clear that major concessions would only be granted to the already better off white working class, while the growing black working class would be met only with further repression (von Fintel, 2017).
Human Resource Management – Performance Linkage
With most political parties including the COSATUanticipated the struggle that had been taken up and strengthened by the growing student, community and workers’ movements. Together they were referred to as the “mass movement”. Trade unions, in particular, were the biggest organisations of the black working class and were often found to be at the forefront of the anti-apartheid struggle. The COSATU remained an important organisation in the hearts and minds of ordinary people, largely because it had taken up arms against the apartheid regime (Adams and Neumark, 2015). Among other organisations of the black working, class unions became the central means through which to struggle against apartheid and capitalism. The COSATU recognised the importance of bringing trade unions and other mass organisations under the umbrella of the Congress Alliance.
The COSATU would serve to unify the different factions of the liberation movement, but it would also importantly mean that the campaign would remain relevant within the country (Tladinyane, 2017). Representatives of the Congress Alliance and some unionists who were supporters of the Alliance began to call on unions to adopt the Minimum wage as a guiding document (von Fintel, 2017). This led to fierce debate within the labour movement as a whole, as some unionists and workers believed that the campaign did not cover workers’ issues significantly enough. Others insisted that even if implemented thoroughly, the Charter would not do away with capitalist production — meaning that any post-apartheid society would remain an exploitative one based on class divisions (Tladinyane, 2017). Socialists within the labour movement were also very wary of de facto accepting the COSATU as the head of the mass movement by adopting the Living wage. Some of those who objected to the adoption of this Charter called for the unions to draw up (Offner, 2013). The members are working on winning the wage increase above the rate of inflation which was not based on the employers goodwill but is based on the member struggling for the same.
Therefore, there has been constant development in the field of academic literature which tries to fathom the influence of increasing the minimum wage level on the employment. Recent studies confirm that there is absolutely little impact seen on the employment scenario even though there is an increase in the minimum wage pay rate. The situation does not even change when there is slow down evident in the labour market. “Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulating effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front”(Gentle, 2015).
References
Adams, S. and Neumark, D. 2015. The effects of living wage laws: Evidence from failed and derailed living wage campaigns. Journal of Urban Economics, 58(2), pp.177-202.
Bhorat, H., Goga, S. and Van Der Westhuizen, C. 2012. Institutional Wage Effects: Revisiting Union And Bargaining Council Wage Premia In South Africa. South African Journal of Economics, 80(3), pp.400-414.
Bunyan, P. 2016. The role of civil society in reducing poverty and inequality: A case study of the living wage campaign in the UK. Local Economy, 31(4), pp.489-501.
Gentle, L. 2015. What about the workers? The demise of COSATU and the emergence of a new movement. Review of African Political Economy, 42(146), pp.666-677.
Hightower, J. 2002. Campaign for a Living Wage. Journal of Public Health Policy, 23(3), p.265.
Offner, A. 2013. The Harvard Living Wage Campaign: Origins and Strategy. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 25(2), pp.135-142.
Pippin, T. 2010. Living Wage Role Play. Teaching Theology & Religion, 13(3), pp.238-240.
Tladinyane, R. 2017. The psychological career resources and organizational commitment foci of South African workforce. Problems and Perspectives in Management, 14(1), pp.168-175.
vonFintel, D. 2017. Institutional wage-setting, labour demand and labour supply: Causal estimates from a South African pseudo-panel. Development Southern Africa, 34(1), pp.1-16.
Wittenberg, M. 2016. Wages and Wage Inequality in South Africa 1994-2011: Part 1 – Wage Measurement and Trends. South African Journal of Economics, 85(2), pp.279-297.
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