Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 6: Down at the dumpsThe low priority given to waste is common to most municipalities – with councillorsand senior managers “wanting it just to disappear”, according to Jogiat. So councillorswho couldn’t get anything better end up serving on waste committees. For someobservers, this is linked to the fact that, in contrast to sectors such as housing, wastehas not produced business opportunities for councillors. More general pressures from‘unfunded mandates’ across the range of service delivery pushes waste down the orderof priority. eThekwini perhaps is an exception to this trend. DSW has put considerableeffort into persuading council of its importance and, according to Parkins, waste isabout fifth on its list of priorities.Privatising …Irrespective of organisational form, the trend to privatisation is common. Even wherewaste services are not corporatised, functions are outsourced on the edges of the originalcore business of collecting and disposing waste from formerly white high income areas.So privatisation is frequently associated with the expansion of services into black areas,often on the rationale of creating ‘entrepreneurial opportunities’ for local business– which may mean contract labour employed directly by the municipality or indirectlythrough a labour broker, or it may mean that collection is outsourced. The effect is toreproduce racially defined differentiation of services.In the end, however, either the municipality pays the contractor directly or people,redefined as consumers of waste services, pay. Municipalities may make savings inthe short term but, in line with the overall experience of privatisation, they will likelypay more in the long term as they increasingly lock themselves into dependence onmonopolistic service providers.… labourIn the meantime, savings are less about the superior efficiency of private enterprisethan the lower wages paid to workers and women workers in particular. Samson showsthat male workers, permanently employed and with full union rights – equivalent toWebster and Van Holdt’s ‘core labour’ – are predominant in the traditional core wasteservice areas. In Johannesburg, “Forty per cent of workers employed by Pikitup werewomen, 93 per cent of whom were employed in the feminized street cleaning section”[2008b: 28]. Most of these women were previously employed as ‘permanent casuals’.Although they are now being made permanent by Pikitup, the number of workersemployed in street cleaning has been progressively cut. This no doubt looks good as- 174 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation