Op-ed: The work that markets miss — and why it’s so important to employ people to do this work

GDP-linked growth will rise with every rand spent on barbed wire, every lit cigarette, every tree turned into paper, every violent car crash that demands repairs. Yet it is care work, environmental stewardship and other ‘valueless’ work that makes all other economic activity possible.

In 2024, the budget for the Presidential Employment Stimulus plummeted by more than two-thirds, compromising a successful public employment programme that created 2 million work and livelihood opportunities in just four years.

The momentum that has been built, which should be used to revitalise and reimagine the role of publicly funded employment in South African society, has stalled – impeded by delays, cuts and shifting policy priorities.

This reveals a deeper problem: an inability to recognise and value work that meets societal needs, but lacks market value, even when such work proves an important part of addressing the jobs crisis.

There are currently 12.2 million people in South Africa who are struggling to find work, while 30 million people live below the upper-bound poverty line. How we confront mass joblessness and widespread poverty today (to say nothing of the climate crisis) will shape the lives of an entire generation – and this success or failure will define the politics of the next decades.

The stakes could not be higher.

The hopeful narrative is that help is on the way. “Inclusive growth,” we are assured, “is at the centre of the work of the government of national unity and at the top of the national agenda”.

While reforms in the electricity, water, digital communications and transport sectors take hold, investments in healthcare, education, social protection and job creation are lacerated. This is, as Amartya Sen diagnoses it, “a mixed tablet with antibiotic and rat poison”, with people enduring huge sacrifices as part of the “treatment”.

The prioritisation of growth has become the fulcrum of all policy choices. It is a teleology that counsels patience and sacrifice, it says that the economy must grow first so that redistribution, through social protection and improved public services, can happen later. It is also, we are reassured, the best way to create jobs and reduce unemployment.

But why does funding for social priorities need to be slashed, rather than raised, to produce inclusive growth? And why would “later” ever come?

There is nothing inherent about the pursuit of economic growth that leads to redistribution, neither does it guarantee sufficient jobs nor the eradication of poverty. The International Labour Organization, for instance, finds that the connection between growth and job creation has weakened significantly in developed economies and nearly vanished in developing ones.

Put differently: recent periods of growth in developing countries have been largely jobless. The relationship between growth and poverty reduction is also not straightforward.

A 2023 United Nations Development Programme study found that among 137 economies experiencing post-pandemic growth, nearly half saw poverty rates climb rather than fall. In sub-Saharan Africa, “nearly 130,000 people per country falling into extreme poverty on average accompanied every one percentage point increase in GDP (gross domestic product) each year”.

Even if we set aside these troubling patterns, any growth-related employment gains will not be enough to address the scale of joblessness in the short or medium term. Right now, fewer than one in 10 unemployed people who are searching for work are successful.

If growth strategies double, treble or quadruple this (and there is no reason to believe that they will), the majority of eight million active job seekers will remain unemployed.

The quest for growth at all costs has restricted the political imagination. It undermines “the most basic development idea” which, for Sen, is about “advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it”.

The social provision of meaningful work, for example, is seen as a drain on the fiscus – and hence, a hindrance for economic progress – rather than a means of meeting unfilled societal needs and to improve the richness of human life.

In 2024, The Presidential Employment Stimulus alone – which has created more than two million jobs and livelihood opportunities since 2020 – saw its budget plummet by more than two-thirds, from R9.4-billion to about R3-billion. The human cost? More than 300,000 people cut off from economic participation.

It goes without saying that this means more than a quarter of a million people have been denied access to the income security and dignity associated with participation in meaningful work. They have also lost an opportunity for skills development, training, asset accumulation and networking which could have improved their longer-term livelihoods. We know this.

What goes unrecognised, however, is that these programmes are not acts of charity. They are employing people to do work that matters. The Social Employment Fund, for example, has created 100,000 jobs that focus on work for the common good.

The fund employs people to do work that contributes to our many unfilled societal needs: supporting a library that anchors the community; installing art to make the park you picnic in even more beautiful; a free after-school sports programme; an urban garden that donates its produce to undernourished people; counselling for victims of violence; and so much more.

These activities respond to clear social needs that market forces fail to address.

More to the point: even if economic growth created jobs, it would not create the sort of jobs that publicly funded employment can. Accelerating growth means expanding GDP, which measures the market value of goods and services produced in a country.

It is therefore the most profitable rather than the most valuable jobs that are rewarded (and created) when the economy grows. But as programme lead of the Presidential Employment Stimulus Kate Philip reminds us: “Even where labour might not have a market value, it has – and can create – social value.”

Making this relationship visible, accordingly, rejigs our assumptions about what counts as valuable work. GDP-linked growth quantifies the profit from private healthcare but misses the preventative benefits of community health workers; it will reward increased retail sales but not the value of an after-school art programme; it will capture private property developments in city centres but not the social cohesion built through public spaces and community art.

It will rise with every rand spent on barbed wire, every lit cigarette, every tree turned into paper, every violent car crash that demands repairs. Yet it is care work, environmental stewardship and other “valueless” work that makes all other economic activity possible.

In a Guardian column Rebecca Solnit insists that “we are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change”. So too are we hemmed in by the value that is (not) acknowledged, and the political imagination that accompanies what is deemed to be value laden.

All this is to say: the missing jobs and poverty crises will not be solved by the single solution of economic growth. The curtailment of successful publicly funded employment programmes like the Presidential Employment Stimulus just means that we have a less-credible response to these challenges.

The two million work and livelihood opportunities created suggest a strategy that says: job creation and meeting unfilled societal needs do not have to be competing priorities.

Yet our current trajectory suggests we have chosen not to listen.