Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 6: Down at the dumpsan increase in ‘productivity’. The streets, however, get dirtier and the women becomeincreasingly vulnerable as they are more likely to work in isolation. To further increasesavings Pikitup contracts out much of its street cleaning to small operators whiletightening up on what it will pay. Most of the workers employed by these companiesare women. They are not covered by bargaining council agreements on minimumwages, are very poorly paid and have tenuous access to labour rights. At the bottom ofthe hierarchy, labour is mobilised in the name of ‘development’, either on public worksprogrammes exempted from key sections of the Basic Conditions of EmploymentAct or as entirely voluntary labour within one or another ‘poverty alleviation’ projectin poor neighbourhoods. Many volunteers have been working for years in “the hopethat volunteering would help them to secure employment”, says Samson, but “byvolunteering they undercut the need for Pikitup and the private companies to hiremore workers” [32].… skillsPrivatisation is also driven by the paucity of skills in municipalities, says Jogiat. Eventhe larger municipalities are having trouble holding onto high level managerial andtechnical skills while in many smaller towns the skills were never really there. ‘Lackof capacity’ has indeed become a leitmotif of the justification for private-publicpartnerships. Political economist Ben Fine [2008b] observes that there has beenadequate capacity to bid for and prepare to host the world cup; that South Africancorporations have demonstrated the capacity to globalise; that this capacity to globalisewas supported by the state’s capacity to facilitate those corporations listing in the globalcentres of accumulation – which was tantamount to managing capital flight from thecountry; that there is capacity to implement BEE; that considerable capacity has beenput at the disposal of the PBMR project along with several other ‘mega-projects’ suchas Coega. In short, the question is not so much one of capacity as of where capacity hasbeen and is being built and the answer, since the late 1980s and more particularly since1996, is ‘not in the public sector’. But this fits within a broader pattern of neo-liberalde-skilling. There is now a global shortage of high level skills across a range of sectorsas a result of corporate as well as state cost cutting through the 80s and 90s. Municipalengineers and managers are consequently now head hunted by corporations and byhigh paying global development institutions such as the World Bank.Wasting the Nation - groundWork - 175 -