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19 August, 2009Precarious work has come to be identified as a major problem undermining the gains of the working class and eroding trade union organisation. The IMF has started a global campaign to tackle the issue of precarious work and much of IMF action programme and implementation strategy aims at addressing this issue at various levels and through different methods. What we need to keep in mind though is that conditions are not the same the world over and as affiliates in Africa there is a need to think about and identify issues on precarious work that are most critical to this region and how these issues should be addressed in the broader IMF action programme and implementation strategy. In this article we focus in on some of the key issues that make the experience of precarious work in Africa different from other parts of the world particularly the more industrialised and so called developed nations.
In this article we focus in on some of the key issues that make the experience of precarious work in Africa different from other parts of the world particularly the more industrialised and so called developed nations.
First we should clarify what it is we are talking about when it comes to the issue of precarious work as there are many different ideas of what precarious work is.
The IMF publication Metal World No.1 of 2007 says that; "Precarious work is typically non-permanent, temporary, casual, insecure and contingent. Workers in these jobs are often not covered by labour law and social security protections. Precarious work is caused by employment practices designed to maximize employer profits and flexibility and to shift risks onto workers. In highly-industrialised countries full-time jobs are being replaced by precarious jobs, while in developing countries precarious work has always been the norm."
This definition is of particular importance for our thinking around precarious work. In developed economies, dealing with precarious work is often associated with combating certain employment practices affecting some workers. But in Africa precarious work is the 'norm' and has been for a long time, so the kind of action necessarily inevitably involves changing the whole labour market structure.
In sub-Saharan Africa employment by sector is quite different to most developed and middle income countries. Industry makes up only 9.6% of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa whilst agriculture makes up the bulk of employment. Trade and subsidy practices of countries in the North that prevent African agricultural produce entering these markets are very harmful to Africa because such a large proportion of people work in this sector. Because countries in Africa compete for scarce investment in industry, it is key that efforts occur across border to reduce the impact of this competition from the arena of labour standards and employment practices.
Even at a regional and sub regional level there are quite dramatic differences between countries and how precarious work is experienced. If you compare the labour market in South Africa to that in Malawi or Zambia there are both differences and similarities in the nature and form of precarious work. Thus whilst a regional approach is critical this needs to be supplemented with national approaches that identify particular issues and experiences of precarious work in a particular country.
The same Metal World article also notes that, "Precarious work is an increasing problem on every continent, undermining wages and conditions of work and threatening to divide working people. It flourishes wherever there is a labour surplus and workers are driven to accept work at any cost -- conditions that exist in many, if not most, parts of the world today."
But these conditions do not exist equally across the world. The statistics below produced by the International Labour Organisation shows large differences in the occurrence of vulnerable in different areas of the world. Vulnerable work as a concept is a more holistic idea about work forms.
Vulnerable Employment as a share of total Employment (%) 2007
| Developed economies and EU | 9.2% |
| Central SE Europe | 19.3% |
| East Asia | 55.7% |
| SE Asia and Pacific | 59.4% |
| South Asia | 77.2% |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 33.2% |
| Middle East | 32.2% |
| North Africa | 30.7% |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 72.9% |
If we begin to develop our understanding of precarious work in an African context we can broaden our understanding of this normative form of employment which goes beyond simply how the contractual relationship between employer and employee is defined.
We could therefore say that there are four dimensions when determining if employment is precarious in nature:
"1. the degree of certainty of continuing employment;
2. control over the labour process, which is linked to the presence or absence of trade unions and relates to control over working conditions, wages, and the pace of work;
3. the degree of regulatory protection; and
4. income level."
Precarious work in developed countries is often associated with part time and hour flexibility whereas in Africa it tends to relate to income level and regulation. Africa is commonly associated with the notion of the working poor. i.e. labour is rendered but wages are insufficient to move workers above the poverty line. This is a particularly serious problem in our context. Some 53% of people who are working in sub Saharan Africa are surviving on less than $1 a day. 85,4% of people working in Africa exist on less than $2 a day. The conclusion we draw is that in Africa precarious work is generally experienced as poverty work regardless of the types of contractual relationships sector and types of employment that may exist.
Precarious work is not isolated from other socio economic issues and struggles in the sub region. To tackle precarious work as though it exists in contractual isolation is to ask to fail. For the working class, poverty and fear are the cement of precarious work along with a host of other social ills including racism, gender discrimination and HIV prevalence.
A cornerstone to addressing these issues should be the eradication of precarious work by building decent work for meeting human needs. The Millennium Development Goals provide a good starting point. A strategic gap has developed which we can use to begin to drive home the necessity of human centred policies for development and attainment of the MDGs.
This gap has arisen from the cracks that have appeared in liberal economic policy prescriptions of the World Bank and the IMF that have been so beneficial to multinationals but have not achieved very much for development in Africa thus requiring a shift to a redistributive focus for the development and the achievement of the MDGs.
Rich countries living up to there Official Development Assistance promises and fairer trade regimes are key to this and trade union solidarity between north and south an essential component for developing pressure towards these ends.
Whilst creating employment and decent wages are key, free public services should be viewed as an essential form of wealth redistribution. Thus alliances are important especially those with an emphasis on public sector delivery. There are obvious alliance between manufacturing and metal unions and public service ones. We should be supporting public sector unions in their Quality Public Services Campaigns in Southern Africa and in return garnering support for campaigns around decent work and eradicating precarious work relations and poverty work.
The Global day of action precarious work is scheduled for the 7th October 2008. The IMF and it affiliates should participate in this action along with other global union federations and their affiliates and the International Trade Union Confederation.