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Sharon Groenmeyer

Women and Social Policy –

Experiences of Some Black Working Women in Contemporary Post-Apartheid South Africa

PhD thesis May 2011

Department of Sociology and Political Science

Faculty of Social Sciences and Technology Management

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, Trondheim

Printed 2011:126 ISBN 978-82-471-2791-9

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Acknowledgements

This thesis is dedicated to my darling Rosanne who continues to live on in my heart and my dreams.

Rosanne I gave you life but you gave my life meaning.

The writing of this thesis has been a long journey of loss and growth. When I undertook this academic path some nine years ago, I did not anticipate the growth curve I would experience. The academic growth occurred during a period of the greatest loss in my life – the death of my only child Rosanne Khadija whose short life was curtailed in a car crash on 13 July 2003. She was only 22 years of age. Rosanne Khadija and Ashraf Lodewyk passed on in the same tragedy. The completion of this thesis is a celebration of their lives.

To my supervisor Prof An-Magritt Jensen, I am eternally grateful for her guidance and patience in trying to unpack what often lurked in my head but not on my script. For the many friends and family who believed I would complete this project I say ‘thank you for your encouragement’, especially my parents Gladys and the late Gerald Groenmeyer, my sister friend Cynthia le Grange, my academic soul mate Paul Lundall and my siblings who constantly teased me about my incomplete thesis. The teasing in itself urged me to complete the project. To Agnes Bolso and Gunn Holden who live in Trondheim and remain close friends as if we live next door to each other, words cannot express my gratitude to you. To Christine Walton-Glover living in the British Virgin Islands, when times were hard you guided and advised me on how to keep focussed on completing this project. Thanks to Lorena Nunez for reading my drafts. To my long-time friends: Jean Pease, Eileen Meyer, Jeremy Daphne, Greg Hussey, Fuad Arnold and Percy Thomas thank you for walking this journey to healing. My appreciation to my young friends Robert Mulligan and Jackie Mabalane who continue to believe that happiness lies within me. My sincere gratitude to Caroline Maseko and Leeann Hartman for listening when I seemed overwhelmed by this task. Finally, my sincerest appreciation to Aubrey Carelse for ensuring I remained determined to complete the final phase of this research project.

To the women who made this research project possible, I am deeply grateful and hope that by recording your experiences, the policy makers who read this manuscript will begin to understand the reality of building substantive equality for all women.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Marginalising Women in the World of Work.................................................................................... 6 1.1 Background ...................................................................................................................................................... 6 1.2 Problem Formulation ........................................................................................................................................ 8 1.3 Research Questions ......................................................................................................................................... 9 1.4 Researching Women’s Equality in the Home and Workplace......................................................................... 10 1.5 Justification for Research on Women and Work............................................................................................. 13 1.6 Summary and the Outline of the Thesis ......................................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2: the Post-Apartheid Active Labour Market Policies....................................................................... 19 2.1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................... 19 2.1.1 The Post-Apartheid South African Labour Market .......................................................................................22 2.2 Evolution of Development Corridors and their Impact on Women Workers.................................................... 23 2.3 The Role of Development Corridors as an Employer of Women .................................................................... 27 2.3.1 The Feminisation of Work in the Apartheid Bantustans........................................................................27

2.3.2 Catalysts for Employment Creation for Historically Disadvantaged Persons ..........................................29 2.3.3 Feminisation of the Labour Market in Development Corridors ..............................................................33 2.4 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................... 37 Chapter 3: Developing a Conceptual framework of marginalisation ............................................................. 39 3.1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................... 39 3.2 Women Move from the Margins to the Centre of the Theoretical Debate on Work ........................................ 39 3.3 Women’s Entry into the Workplace Creates Feminisation of Work................................................................. 41 3.4 Feminisation of Work Introduces Labour-Intensive Production ...................................................................... 45 3.4.1 The Feminisation of the South African Labour Market .........................................................................46 3.5 Towards a Theory of Marginalisation.............................................................................................................. 51 3.6 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................... 52 Chapter 4: Utilising a Feminist Methodology to study Women in Male-dominated Employment ............... 53 4.1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................... 53 4.2 Epistemology of Location................................................................................................................................ 54 4.3 Methodology from a Feminist Perspective...................................................................................................... 55 4.4 Methods.......................................................................................................................................................... 59 4.4.1 Case Study Method .........................................................................................................................59

4.4.2 Interviews with Key Informants and Women Respondents...................................................................62

4.4.3 Observations and Field Notes...........................................................................................................68 4.5 Analysis of Data.............................................................................................................................................. 69 4.6 Defining the Case Studies .............................................................................................................................. 70 4.7 Reflective Practice: Praxis and Research Ethics............................................................................................ 72 4.7.1 Research Ethics ..............................................................................................................................72

4.7.2 Reflective Practice...........................................................................................................................72

4.7.3 Reflecting on the Intersection of Race, Gender and Class ...................................................................73

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Chapter 5: Women Working in the Construction Industry.............................................................................. 78 5.1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................... 78 5.2 Findings and Analysis of Research ................................................................................................................ 80 5.3 Social Policies Promoting Women and PDIs in Labour-Intensive Work ......................................................... 81 5.3.1 Research Findings...........................................................................................................................82

5.3.2 Analysis of Findings.........................................................................................................................83 5.4 Social Policies Promoting Government Procurement Policies........................................................................ 83 5.4.1 Research Findings...........................................................................................................................84

5.4.2 Analysis of Findings.........................................................................................................................87 5.5 Women’s Empowerment through Skills Transfer and Job Creation ............................................................... 87 5.5.1 Research Findings...........................................................................................................................88

5.5.2 Analysis of Findings.........................................................................................................................90 5.6 Women-Owned SMMEs’ Ability to Compete with Large Construction Companies......................................... 91 5.6.1 Research Findings...........................................................................................................................92

5.6.2 Analysis of Research Findings ..........................................................................................................94 5.7 Power Relations between Men and Women Workers in the Construction Workplace.................................... 95 5.7.1 Research Findings...........................................................................................................................95

5.7.2 Analysis of Research .....................................................................................................................100 5.8 Evidence of Joint Decision-Making Processes in the Home......................................................................... 101 5.8.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................102

5.8.2 Analysis of Research Findings ........................................................................................................102 5.9 Reasons for Accepting Poorly Paid Sub-contracts ....................................................................................... 103 5.9.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................103

5.9.2 Analysis of Findings.......................................................................................................................104 5.10 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................. 105 5.10.1 Developing a Theory of Marginalisation .........................................................................................105 Chapter 6: Women Working in the Fishing Industry ..................................................................................... 108 6.1 Introduction................................................................................................................................................... 108 6.2 Findings and Analysis of Research .............................................................................................................. 110 6.3 Social Policies Promoting Women and PDIs in Labour-intensive Work in the Fishing Industry ................... 110 6.3.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................111

6.3.2 Analysis of Research Findings ........................................................................................................115 6.4 Social Policies Promoting Government Procurement Policies...................................................................... 116 6.4.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................116

6.4.2 Research Analysis.........................................................................................................................117 6.5 Women’s Empowerment through Skills Transfer and Job Creation ............................................................. 117 6.5.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................117

6.5.2 Analysis of Research .....................................................................................................................118 6.6 Women-Owned SMMEs’ Ability to Compete with Large Fish Processing Companies ................................. 119 6.6.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................119

6.6.2 Analysis of Research .....................................................................................................................120 6.7 Power Relations between Men and Women in the Fish Production Workplace ........................................... 120

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6.7.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................121

6.7.2 Analysis of Research .....................................................................................................................122 6.8 Evidence of Joint Decision-Making Processes in the Home......................................................................... 125 6.8.1 Research Findings.........................................................................................................................126

6.8.2 Analysis of Findings.......................................................................................................................127 6.9 Reasons for Accepting Poorly Remunerated Short-term Contracts ............................................................. 128 6.9.1 Influences on NH’s Life that Encouraged Her to Make Some of Her Decisions ....................................128

6.9.2 Different Influences on FK’s Life......................................................................................................131 6.10 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................. 134 6.10.1 Building a Theory of Marginalisation ..............................................................................................134 Chapter 7: Developing a Theory of Marginalisation...................................................................................... 137 7.1 Introduction................................................................................................................................................... 137 7.2 Matrix of Findings ......................................................................................................................................... 137 7.3 Intersectionality of Race, Class and Gender ................................................................................................ 139 7.4 Building a Theory of Marginalisation............................................................................................................. 140 7.5 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................... 145 Chapter 8: Conclusion – The Paradox of Choice........................................................................................... 147 8.1 Introduction................................................................................................................................................... 147 8.2 The Research Findings................................................................................................................................. 149 8.2.1 Labour-Intensive Unskilled Work Promoted as Female-Dominated Employment..................................150 8.2.2 Do Short-term Contracts Enhance Women’s Social Emancipation?....................................................152

8.2.3 Do Women’s New Workplace Roles Shift the Decision-making Process in the Home? .........................154

8.2.4 Do Flexible Contracts Encourage Women to Make Choices Within Constraints? .................................157 8.3 Symbolic Capital as a Path towards Breaking the Mould of Marginalisation ................................................ 159 8.4 Breaking the Bonds of Marginalisation ......................................................................................................... 160 8.4.1 Is Flexible Employment Able to Promote Emancipation towards Substantive Equality? ........................160 8.4.2 Towards Decent Work for Marginalised Women Workers ..................................................................162 8.5 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................... 163 Bibliography...................................................................................................................................................... 165 Online References ............................................................................................................................................ 179 Appendix A: Interview Schedule for Case studies ........................................................................................ 181 List of Tables and Figures Table 1: Expanded unemployment rates by Gender, l995 and 2002 from Hinks (2003:5) ………….………..…….42 Figure 1: The flexible worlds of work ……………………………………………………….………………………..…...43 Figure 2: Case Study of SME Construction Company, a Women-Owned SMME Construction Company……….71 Figure 3: Case Study of Women and Men Fishers who live in Paternoster and Saldanha Bay……………...…… 97

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CHAPTER 1: MARGINALISING WOMEN IN THE WORLD OF WORK

1.1 Background

The significance of work1 is that it is a defining feature for human beings because it provides opportunities for autonomy2, dignity and activities through which women and men are able to affirm their identity3. The nature of work is crucial to an individual’s choice and furthermore, the satisfaction derived from employment impacts directly on family life and the quality of human relationships (ILC 89 – ILO Report). Dignity and autonomy are two of the many values bestowed by the South African Constitution (No. 108 of l996) and Bill of Rights on women and men as citizens of South Africa. These values are reiterated in the astute words of the Director General of the International Labour Organisation:

‘The goal of decent work is best expressed through the eyes of people. It is about your job and future prospects; about your working conditions; about balancing work and family life, putting your kids through school or getting them out of child labour. It is about gender equality, equal recognition, and enabling women to make choices and take control of their lives. It is about your personal abilities to compete in the market place, keep up with new technological skills and remain healthy. It is about developing your entrepreneurial skills, about receiving a fair share of the wealth that you have helped to create and not being discriminated against; it is about having a voice in your workplace and your community.’

(ILC 89 – ILO Report 1(A): 2001)

Conversely, for the majority of the poor, the global decent work deficit is expressed in the absence of sufficient employment opportunities, inadequate social protection, the denial of rights at work and shortcomings in social dialogue. Consequently, the experience of the majority of the unemployed and poor is that of a lack of dignity and autonomy. The battery of post-apartheid public policies enforces the right to dignity and equality as a fundamental right to address the

1 Work or employment is explained as an activity an individual engages in by offering a service in exchange for a monetary reward

2 The concept of autonomy is based on the freedom to choose. 3 The concept of identity is an umbrella term to describe how a person understands him or herself as a

discrete and separate entity.

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myriad of imbalances invoked on Black South Africans under the previous dispensation. As Bentley and Habib (2008:18) suggest, the redress legislation identifies three very distinct categories of disadvantage that warrant redress, namely race, gender and disability. Regarding post-apartheid constitutional dispensation, the authors further state that while racial discrimination was apartheid’s most obvious manifestation, two other forms of discrimination, namely gender and disability, were implicit, but remained hidden, in its political and socio-economic architecture (2008:18).

The nexus between political access and equality-enhancing social and public policy is an important relationship to be deconstructed and reconstructed in an attempt to understand how highly unequal societies like South Africa attempt to overcome differences of race, class and gender and how they manage to implement gender sensitive measures focusing on poor women (Hassim 2009:2). Consequently, the transcendence of all three categories of disadvantage has thus been defined as a constitutional obligation and an immediate political priority (ibid). The implementation of redress involved three distinct forms of discrimination: race, class and gender. Generic legislation to advance the agendas of Black and historically disadvantaged citizens is coupled with legislation focussed on affirming specific groups4 and targeting particular arenas of activity5. For example: the White Paper on Transformation of the Public Service (DPSA l995), the White Paper on Affirmative Action in the Public Service (DPSA l998), the Employment Equity Act (EEA) (No. 55) of l998 and the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (No. 4) of 2000. A major thrust is the targeting and promotion of women through affirmative action workplace policies.

Legislation was accompanied by the development of institutional infrastructure created to overcome the legacies of racial and gender discrimination. Various labour market institutions were created to facilitate collective bargaining, enforce minimum conditions of employment, promote employment equity and coordinate various vocational training initiatives (Bentley and Habib 2008:20). While the different categories of discrimination have been identified, in reality it is

4 For example: Choice of Termination of Pregnancy Act (No. 92 of l996), the White Paper on Integrated National Disability Strategy, the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (No. 3 of 2000) and the Report on Disability Equity in the South African Public Service.

5 For example: the Black Economic Empowerment legislation, industrial transformation charters, education and welfare policy.

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the category of racial disadvantage that is being addressed in current legislation. For example: affirmative action policy as embodied in the Employment Equity Act (No 55 of l998)6 emphasises the acquisition of skills for affirmative action candidates (Modisha 2008:156). To this end the development of employees of an enterprise in line with the Skills Development Act (SDA) (No. 97) of l998 provides an institutional framework for devising and implementing national, sector and work-place strategies to develop and improve the skills of the South African workforce.

For women, affirmative action policies are vitally important because labour markets are institutions which are ‘bearers of gender [in] the sense that these are instantiations of gender

relations in which the labour market is embedded’ (Elson l999:611). According to Elson (l999), labour markets are social stereotypes which associate masculinity with having authority over others in the work place (being the ‘boss') and social stereotypes about the meaning of ‘man’s

work’ and ‘women’s work’ (Elson l999:611). For Elson, such stereotypes are not matters of individual preference, but are inscribed in social institutions. According to Anker (l998:23) occupational segregation by sex is closely linked to the characteristics of ’female’ occupations which correspond to typical stereotypes of women and their supposed abilities. The gendered segmentation of the labour market has a direct link to the quality of work, as experienced by women.

1.2 Problem Formulation

The sense of social life linked to economic life that affords one the right to freedom to choose, dignity as a human being and equality in the workplace inspired me to embark on research into why certain categories of working women are marginalised in post-apartheid South Africa. When examining post-apartheid South Africa I saw my role as a feminist researcher and as one which enabled me to contribute to creating knowledge on how certain categories of women workers were able to utilise the new opportunities provided by the new dispensation. It is acknowledged that the new labour policies have eliminated racial discrimination, but as von Holdt and Webster

6 Section 6 (2) (b) states that ‘it is not unfair discrimination to…distinguish, exclude or prefer any person on the basis of inherent requirement of a job’. Section 15(l) assets that ‘affirmative action measures are measures designed to ensure that suitably qualified people from designated groups have equal employment opportunities and are equitably represented in all occupational categories and levels in the workforce of a designated employer’.

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(2005) indicate, the labour market can be non-discriminatory but simultaneously socially inequitable as previous labour market policies privileging White workers continue to impact negatively on labour market access for Black workers. Research on women’s participation in the South African economy indicates that since l995 women have been employed in increasing numbers7 (van der Westhuizen et al. 2007, Casale 2004). However, as women have entered the labour market, the capacity for employers to restructure the labour market towards more flexible employment contracts has tied them into global supply chains where South African employers are able to manipulate the impermanent employment relationship which is considerably different to that of permanent workers.

Flexibilisation is a major element of the nature of work that I will explore since this rapid increase in women’s entry into the workplace demonstrates South Africa’s shift from a domestic to a globally-integrated economy which has rapidly altered workplace power relations8. Consequently, the majority of women workers enter casual, poorly-paid jobs because many local employers are part of international networks with global partners who determine the employment relationship according to profit margins. Although South African women have formal equality and are protected by progressive workplace legislation, like most developing countries, the labour market provides jobs for a fraction of the entire working population with the majority of workers employed in casual, temporary, flexible and contract employment without job security and work-related benefits.

1.3 Research Questions

Three broad questions guided my research:

What is the nature and scope of waged employment that Black women were engaged in during the contemporary post-apartheid democratic period and how are they positioned as workers within the construction and fish processing sectors of the economy?

7 In 1995-2005 the female workforce increased by 41%, almost double that of males (22%). 8 Forms of flexibility have two sub-concepts: functional flexibility which refers to the internal labour market

and secondly, numerical flexibility which refers to changes to the number of workers.

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How does the existing division of labour including categories of work promote gender equality?

Do flexible contracts that dominate these sectors contribute towards women’s emancipation?

The research question commences with an investigation into the nature of employment for Black women during the 16 years of democracy in South Africa and two further questions are posed:

(i) Does democracy promote equality between men and women in the workplace?

(ii) Do flexible employment contracts contribute to Black women’s emancipation?

It is the everyday experiences of women interviewed that I have woven into my textual and discourse analysis. In the words of Charles Lemert: ‘When people feel that pulse, and stop to think, then tell others about the experience, they are led into a wider world of things in which even the smallest of local giving and taking carries the energy of large social forces’ (Lemert 2005:xiv). It is the observation of the everyday life of working women on the level of the personal and the larger, structured world of both the local and global that inspired me to create a dialogue on how certain women perceive their lives in post-apartheid South Africa. I embarked on what Lemert observes as a process by which, ‘in the living of lives, … it is often difficult to make a distinction between the local and the global even when most of us find it easier to see the actions in the street below than the force of global structure that cause men and women to move about, sometimes under the cover of night, to find a way to feed their kids or their habits’ (Lemert 2005: xv).

1.4 Researching Women’s Equality in the Home and Workplace

Women’s rapid entry into the workplace has promoted the feminisation of certain categories of work. On the one hand, the expansion of employment for women provides important opportunities for women to enter paid employment. On the other hand, the benefits are limited because of their predominantly informal and casual work status. Informal employment is considered as a transitional activity that would be superseded by development or incorporation into global economy, but considerable statistical, empirical and analytical evidence indicates an increase in

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the informalisation of production in countries of both the global South and the North. Informalised work takes place in informal workshops while home-based production and petty trading are mainly dominated by women workers (Pearson 2007:203). Pearson further states that while it is difficult to capture this data regarding women, ILO data indicates that women comprise 30-90% of street vendors, 35-80% of home-based workers and 80% of industrial sub-contracted home workers (ILO data 2002:6-8). Pearson (2007:202) notes that ILO data (2002) indicates that the informal economy continues to be the location of recorded employment for the vast majority of women in non-agricultural sectors in Latin America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Informal work is a source of cash income for women, but patterns of globalisation in the economy precipitating the increase of the informalisation of work, earmark women for employment in particular industries such as garments and computer component manufacturing. These labour market trends bring into sharp contrast the different forms of social policies linked to employment and the care of the family. The restructuring of the workplace encourages women to find employment in casualised, poorly paid and temporary jobs without social benefits in order to meet their immediate needs for income. Consequently, women are trapped in a ‘dilemma’ of poorly paid work or the choice of unemployment and no income to manage their livelihoods.

The influence of flexible, short-term contracts has a negative impact on women’s emancipation. While it is the emancipatory process inherent to constitutional rights that encourages women to enter employment normally allocated to men, employers’ ability to alter the employment contract disadvantages women workers. As a result, women’s entry into the labour force as equals to their male counterparts produces tensions in the operation and building of democratic institutions and this may be a reason for the contradictory outcomes for the inclusion of women in the allocation of resources. Men are aware that women and other marginalised groupings have little power to shape the allocation of resources and this may be an explanation as to why men are willing to concede formal equality to women. Men are acutely aware that women’s entry into a gender segregated labour market will not alter the power relations because women enter the workplace at the bottom of the career ladder.

Within the South African context, the ‘dilemma’ of poorly paid work is rhetorical because of the historical legacy of border industries and Bantustan policy promoting the deregulation of industrial legislation while favouring the employment of women in poorly paid jobs with little prospect of career advancement or skills development. The newly created Development Corridors and their

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preferential procurement policies promoting women’s participation in employment creation projects appear to perpetuate the employment of female labour in lowly-paid, casual work in labour-intensive industries. For women living in the former Bantustans, there was little choice between the low waged employment and work as a domestic servant in a White suburban home. Similarly, the newly created Development Corridors and their preferential procurement policies promoting women’s participation in employment creation projects appear to perpetuate the employment of female labour in lowly-paid, casual work in labour-intensive industries.

Post-apartheid South African policies have discouraged passive labour markets or the system of welfarism9 of the developed economies; considering this approach as creating dependency on state resources. Instead, policies of active labour markets encourage people to earn an income from rapidly informalising workplaces by setting up Small Micro Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) or from job creation, or government-sponsored public works programmes (Hassim 2006). The core of this research is directed toward the development of a conceptual and theoretical framework which juxtaposes women’s rapid entry into poorly paid casualised work or as owners of SMMEs against the progressive social rights for women. The research project has a number of aims that investigate the interconnection between social policies that feminise particular types of employment and the manner in which these policies have impacted on women’s empowerment in the workplace. Despite women’s increasing participation in paid work, labour markets continue to reproduce gender-based segmentations and inequalities in wages/income, work-related social benefits, and social security. Moreover, it is debatable whether women in temporary, flexible contracts are able to influence decision making within the home. The research proposes to map out the complex ways in which social policies which promote women in male jobs contradict or confirm this approach to equality in the workplace. Developing a gender-analytical framework will reveal the extent to which inequalities (of class, gender and race) are being intensified or lessened as a consequence of shifts in the global economy, and processes of privatisation and commercialisation taking place within South Africa.

9 The term ‘welfarism’ is usually associated with the economic conception of welfare. South Africa has a system of direct welfare service of social assistance in the form of cash transfers or pensions and grants to poor people and disabled people (Lund 2008:1).

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The research aims to explore whether women SMME owners benefit from government procurement policies which facilitate women’s access to funding to finance their contracts and whether they are able to build sustainable enterprises capable of competing with multinational companies. The research seeks to establish whether women in flexible contracts are able to alter the power relationship within the household. Unpaid work continues to be a strong feature of women’s elastic day. Consequently, the research will also focus on whether women’s unpaid care work continues to form the bedrock on which social protection is subsidised, with erosions in state provisioning impacting most strongly on women.

1.5 Justification for Research on Women and Work

The struggle for gender equality and economic justice for women has a long history in South Africa. Women, as part of the community and members of trade unions, participated in the struggle for democracy. The democratic transition in South Africa heralded the introduction of gender-sensitive policies which have introduced many benefits contributing to the development of legislation and policy in order to address violence against women and the termination of pregnancy, as some of the most important legislative reforms (Meer 2005). Other programmes geared towards the emancipation of women include the provision of free health services for pregnant women and children under the age of five years. The South African Constitution (No. 108 l996) Article 9 on Equality of the Bill of Rights ensures that 33.33% of all parliamentary seats must be held by women. Within the first decade of democratisation, this target was achieved and the 50/50 percent campaign for equal representation of male and female members of parliament is gaining ground. Similarly, through various affirmative action policies, the government promotes a greater representation of women in the private and public sectors. However, the shift from the political struggle for democracy which dismantled the apartheid system to the development of a more egalitarian society means that progress on gender equality made during the transition does not automatically translate into gains for women. This is particularly evident in the areas of economic policy and land reform where male privilege is more overtly threatened by the incorporation of women. Legislation on land reform has been a major source of tension because women as part of a family are entitled to lodge claims for the restitution of land confiscated during the apartheid period. Men are considered the traditional head of the family and men who marry by customary law should enter into an agreement with each of their wives. However, due to the

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strength of traditional, patriarchal frameworks that govern African culture, women have very little power even though legislation supports their emancipation. Consequently, cultural preservation reinforces patriarchy and despite the legacy of apartheid where women worked the small family plots in the Bantustans, women’s access to control over important livelihood resources such as land and crops is not deemed important (Hassim 2009:5).

Women’s representation has opened spaces for political liberalisation, enabling women’s participation at the highest level of decision making. But, as Hassim opines, inclusion has ambivalent aspects, being both seductive in its promise of power and also implicating women in the operations of power. Notwithstanding Hassim’s viewpoint, there have been many changes providing access for women to head key state parastatals or hold positions of power in organisations such as the Ministry of Defence or the South African Reserve Bank, indicating that institutions are able to transform themselves. However, the equality agenda for feminists is very enticing and sometimes they are caught between a rock and a hard place, when their agenda is appropriated and mutated into mechanisms of governance and regulation, losing its ambition of transforming gender power relations. For instance, feminists’ ambitions of transforming decision-making institutions through the strategy of gender mainstreaming were thwarted by the reduction of this approach to technical checklists (Manicom 2001). In certain circumstances, inclusion masks the relations of power through the redistribution of places in the state without making fundamental shifts in the underlying inequalities of power. In other words, women’s political access has increased but this formal inclusion has the potential to weaken or co-opt the gender-equality agenda because women’s organisations become development partners and may not have the objectivity to retain their own interests (Hassim 2009:7). The lack of real transformation in the workplace, where women are primarily engaged in labour-intensive jobs, lends validity to Hassim’s argument.

The phenomenon of women in labour-intensive jobs, especially women who work in male-dominated employment, is an under-researched area. According to von Holdt and Webster (2005), the post-apartheid labour market has created different categories of workers and women working in labour-intensive employment which would be categorised as the least secure form of employment. Post-apartheid affirmative action policies encourage the rapid entry of women into the workplace in order to develop careers previously reserved for men, but this is done without the support of a national security system which recognises women’s caring roles. Consequently,

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policies targeting women may have similar outcomes to the informalisation of factories located in labour-intensive assembly lines turning out garments, sportswear, trainers, micro-electronic components and consumer goods for the world market. These are often assumed to be offering opportunities for women to have a stake in a higher-paid, regulated and protected industrial sector, previously reserved for a labour aristocracy of male workers (Pearson 2007:203).

Pearson (2007) notes that women have been recruited in these factories under conditions increasingly remote from any general understanding of formal sector working conditions and employment. Eisenberg’s (l998) study of women in construction follows a similar pattern to train and employ women traders in a male-dominated industry. Similar to the South African situation, women were encouraged to enter the construction industry because the U.S Department of Labor’s affirmative action legislation set goals and targets to provide equal opportunity for women (l998:19). The demand for and targeting of women in certain sectors of the economy, particularly the export-oriented sectors in post-apartheid South Africa, is of particular interest. My interest in this question was spurred by Pearson’s (l998) analysis of the reasons for the increase in the demand for women’s work in lowly-paid manufacturing factories in export industries. Her findings reveal that it is not the comparative advantage of women’s ‘nimble fingers’, nor their ‘docility’ and productivity, but rather the lower unit costs attainable from the employment of ‘cheap’ female labour that has encouraged this rapid rise in women’s employment. Therefore, women’s participation in employment defined as ‘male’ is synonymous with the feminisation of the industry and could marginalise women workers.

Marginalisation of women through the feminisation of labour process is confirmed by theorists working on the segmentation of the labour market who note that in both the primary and secondary labour markets, men and women participate in different labour processes or sub-processes. They often operate different physical technologies that require skills or knowledge, which have become defined as either male or female (Roldan l996:64). Feminist scholars concur with this perspective by observing that the subordinate role of women in the labour market is a result of the segmentation thereof and not because of capabilities based on gender (Rees 1992). Often enterprises take advantage of pre-existing gender differences, especially the domestic sexual division of labour in the structuring of occupations, and the segregation and codification of employment practices. Therefore, since women’s entry into ‘male occupations’ may reinforce or contradict this stereotype, one of the aims of the research is to interrogate whether this is a reality

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or whether there has indeed been a shift towards the feminisation of the industries which form the basis of the research.

Since its re-entry into the global economy, South Africa has witnessed a continued shrinkage in formal employment. The spiralling levels of unemployment in the formal sector force many women entering the formal labour market to do so as part-time workers. Writing on part-time work in developed economies, Orloff (l993) notes that such a phenomenon tends to reinforce a gender hierarchy by privileging full-time workers over those who do unpaid work or who combine part-time work with domestic or caring work, generally classified as social reproduction. This reinforces the sexual division of labour in which women do the bulk of unpaid work. Women’s responsibility for social reproduction has increased because of the state’s failure to provide basic care of health and welfare. In the South African context, women’s subordination (especially Black women) in the secondary labour market would be worsened by the suspension of labour standards inherent in the flexibilisation of labour markets. This process is reinforced by patriarchal ideology that care should be primarily located in the family which skews the responsibilities of social reproduction on women. Women’s social reproduction has nevertheless enabled them to gain entry into paid employment, even though such employment is defined as labour-intensive.

Research on labour-intensive industries demonstrates that this type of employment is precarious and characterised by flexible working hours, short-term contracts and casual employment. Generally, these employment contracts lack social security and employment benefits. Women face long and erratic hours and are at risk of sudden job loss. Throughout the developing world, the majority of these jobs – which include casual day labourers, domestic workers, industrial outworkers and various types of contract workers, such as those employed in labour-intensive manufacture for export as well as export horticulture – are held by women. Thus, informal employment is now defined as work lacking secure contracts, worker benefits, or social protection. Theorists and other observers refer to such work as ‘precarious’, highlighting the absence of decent employment standards and the prevalence of high-risk conditions that tend to characterise the work (Oxfam 2005). According to Chen et al. (2005), the scope of labour regulations and the extent to which they are enforced and complied with, means that informal employment regulations can exist in almost any type of wage employment.

Research by Chen et al. (2005:39) estimates that in most regions of the developing world, 60% or more of women workers are in informal employment (broadly defined), ranging from as low as

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43% in Northern Africa to as high as 84% in sub-Saharan Africa. According to Chen et al. (2005), there are many categories of flexible workers. These include five broad categories namely: owner operators of informal enterprises who hire others; a more entrepreneurial class of employers who invest their own capital in running informal enterprises and who hire others and may not, therefore, contribute their own labour. The second category is that of the own account workers: owner operators of single-units or family businesses or farms who do not hire others and who contribute their own capital and labour to the enterprise. The third category constitutes unprotected employees with a known employer; an informal enterprise, a formal enterprise, a contracting agency or a household. The fourth category refers to casual labourers who are wage workers with no fixed employer who sell their labour on a daily or seasonal basis; industrial outworkers: sub-contracted workers who produce from their homes or small workshop. The fifth category refers to dependent contractors such as commission agents who sell goods on a commission for others or taxi and truck drivers who work for a company that owns the vehicles they drive.

Chen et al. (2005:61) states that certain categories of workers can be independent or less dependent on wage employment, depending on the specific contractual conditions under which they are employed. Flexible workers who are self-employed range from fully-dependent arrangements in which the owner operator controls the process and outcomes of work and absorbs the risks, to semi-dependent arrangements in which the operator does not control the entire process or outcome of the work but may still absorb all of the risks involved. Self-employed workers are dependent on their clients or dominant counterparts who provide the contract and/or purchase the finished goods. Inevitably, self-employed semi-dependent partnerships are shaped by power dynamics which are in turn influenced by economic relationships that are more often than not, conflicting or contradictory.

The research aims to interrogate these contradictions, contestations and conflicts between progressive policy formulation and the imperatives of economic policy that introduce labour-intensive work for women who have flexible contracts without benefits. Second, but equally important is the focus on SMME development for women which in the wake of high unemployment is encouraged by government’s active labour market policies.

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1.6 Summary and the Outline of the Thesis

Chapter 2 maps the history of South African active labour market policies by reviewing literature on labour markets and focusing specifically on Development Corridors, the nature of labour-intensive industries and its significance for the employment of women.

Chapter 3 develops a conceptual framework of marginalisation for Black women in short-term contracts as workers or SMME owners.

Chapter 4 describes the research design, using qualitative research methods to develop two case studies. It draws on a variety of feminist writers to describe the approach to the research project.

Chapter 5 analyses the research findings and creates a discourse on women’s experiences of work in the construction industry, including the opportunities and constraints of working in a male-dominated industry

Chapter 6 analyses the findings and creates a discourse on women’s work in fishing production. Research on the different categories of women workers and women-owned Small Micro Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) is analysed in order to assess whether women in fishing production are able to shift the boundaries of the male-dominated industry.

Chapter 7 uses the analysis of the two case studies and builds a theory of women’s work within the South African economy, especially the nature of work, the gender construction of the labour market and its relationship to social policies enacted during the new dispensation.

Chapter 8 consolidates the analysis of the two case studies, reiterates the major elements of the theory of marginalisation of women in male-dominated work and extends the theory to include why women accept these poorly paid contracts. These viewpoints are pointers towards lessons for South African policy makers and further research.

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CHAPTER 2: THE POST-APARTHEID ACTIVE LABOUR MARKET POLICIES

2.1 Introduction

Development Corridors have a particular history as part of the industrialisation of South Africa and its dependence on a Black labour force that was removed from their ancestral lands to facilitate development. The Land Act of l913 relocated and confined Africans to 13% of the land in the country. These geographical areas became islands of labour reservoirs for the industrialised White urban areas. Similarly, the establishment of Development Corridors in post-apartheid South Africa depends on a Black labour force. An aspect of policy is active labour markets which have numerous elements to generate employment with a focus on skills development; the main element being promoted is the micro-enterprise development/self-employment assistance as a vehicle to assist unemployed workers to start their own enterprises within the parameters of the development zones. While the development zones have been established to redraw the spatial boundaries in post-apartheid South Africa, the nature of the export-oriented policy contradicts the tenor of the equality legislation promoted by the South African constitution.

This chapter reviews the literature on social policies in relation to the labour market policy in South Africa, the importance for post-apartheid economic policy as well as its effects and the manner in which it has contributed to women’s emancipation. Social policy is an aspect of public policy that focuses on social issues which aims to improve human welfare and to meet human needs for education, health, housing and social security. In relation to the world of work, social policy is the concern for the rights and security of the workforce, emphasising the absence of health and safety provisions and/or the ban on workers’ rights to organise as a trade union as a contravention of decent work10 policies. Aina (2004:4) states that social policy is, therefore, often viewed from a narrow, sectoralist and often managerialist perspective focused on the

10 Decent work is about working conditions; about balancing work and family life, putting kids through school or keeping them out of child labour. Decent Work is about gender equality, equal recognition, and enabling women to make choices and take control of their lives. Decent Work relates to personal abilities to compete in the market place, keep up with new technological skills and remain healthy. Decent Work is developing entrepreneurial skills and receiving a fair share of the wealth that workers have helped to create. Decent work is not being discriminated against and having a voice in the workplace and community. http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/Mainpillars/WhatisDecentWork/ lang--en/index.htm. Accessed 30 July 2010.

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administration of social welfare and social security, or framed more holistically within a transformational perspective of social development. Mkwandire (2005) expanded the definition and scope of social policy to include concepts of universalism11 versus residualism12 and the targeting of special groups or discussions on the appropriate interface between social and economic policy or the role of the state not just as regulator but also as a provider of social welfare.

Mkwandire goes further when he states that:

‘Ideologies play an important role in the choice of instruments utilized to address problems of poverty, inequality and insecurity. Each of the core concerns of social policy – need … and citizenship – are social constructs that derive full meaning from the cultural and ideological definition of ‘deserving poor’, ‘entitlement’ and citizens’ rights’ (2005:1).

His viewpoint acknowledges the values underpinning public policy, in particular core values of equality and redistribution which seem to have been displaced by the emphasis on poverty. As Mkwandire (2005) states, the rediscovery of ‘the social’ came in the wake of more than two decades of stabilisation and adjustment policies that had monopolised the development agenda. The breaking of this silence in the extensive and diverse feminist literature, is an attempt to understand the absence of social policies for the different facets of women’s employment in export-oriented industries, and is a result of the focus on women’s working conditions and remuneration rather than on the wider economic and social entitlements available to the workforce (Pearson and Razavi 2004:4). Thus, a gender perspective on social policies in the South, as in the North until quite recently, remained on the margins of these debates. In the 1990s, social policy became prominent on the agendas of a wide range of development actors. More recently, Hassim and Razavi (2006) attempt to fill this hiatus in research by providing an analytical framework in their book titled ‘Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context’ which analyses the gendered nature of economic transformations in the late twentieth century. Their

11 Universalism means the entire population is the beneficiary of social benefits as a basic right (Mkandawire, T 2005:7)

12 Residualism refers to the role the state ought to play in providing social services and social support (Hassim and Razavi 2006:23)

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contributions draw out the implications for gender equality of shifts in the nature of labour markets and the relationship between paid and unpaid work.

Social policy for late industrialisers, of which South Africa is an example, has the advantage of evolving different institutions crafted to build social cohesion and equity with distribution. Feminist economist Diane Elson states, ‘in the real world people do not live their lives in separate domains – as the economic or the social’ (Elson 2004:63). Hence, it is argued that economic policy is social policy. Elson further states there are different institutional responsibilities for economic and social policy, different policy analysis communities and different interest groups. She further states that standard neo-liberal approaches over-emphasised these differences and assumed that each strand of policy could be pursued independently of the other (ibid). This intersection of social and economic development policies have assisted in forging social cohesion enjoyed by late-industrialising countries and these include the active use of social policy for land reform in Taiwan and South Korea, ‘affirmative action’ in Malaysia, labour protection through lifetime employment in Japan, forced savings, comprehensive insurance and pension schemes in Singapore, and the restriction on luxury consumption notably in Japan and South Korea, amongst others (Mkwandire 2005:25). These approaches have not been classical welfare state characteristics but their influence on the development of these countries has been far-reaching. Mkwandire (2005:25) offers a further perspective to this debate. He states that rather than adopting a minimalist safety-net type provision of Korea or the fully-fledged welfare state of the Swedish variety the literature reviewed suggests that the composition of social policies adopted by South Africa tends to pay greater attention to the production-enhancing elements of social policy and less on redistributive and protective elements of social policy, thus highlighting affirmative action, public works programmes and targeting of women in labour-intensive industries. The production-enhancing elements of social policy, targeting women as preferred workers, or bidders of government contracts or employment in public works programmes define the current government’s approach to Spatial Development Initiatives as geographical areas where women would be the targeted group for employment creation or the financing of SMMEs. Consequently the promotion of public works programmes to address unemployment and SMMEs as an avenue for the facilitation of income generation for entrepreneurs is an element of the current active labour market in South Africa.

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2.1.1 The Post-Apartheid South African Labour Market

In the restructuring of the labour market to address the high levels of unemployment, South African social policy had a choice of following different types of programmes considered as Active13 Labour Market Policies (Auer et al. 2008 and Betcherman et al. 2004:ii). These include:

Employment services. These services include counselling, placement assistance, job matching, labour exchanges, and other related services.

Training for the unemployed. Participants often benefit from these programmes in terms of higher employment rates but not in terms of higher earnings.

Re-training for workers in mass layoffs. These programmes most often have no positive impacts, although there are exceptions.

Training for youth. These programmes are almost always unsuccessful in improving labour market outcomes, at least in developed countries.

Wage/employment subsidies. Most often these do not have a positive impact and have substantial deadweight and substitution costs.

Public works. This can be an effective short-term safety net but public works do not improve future labour market prospects for participants.

Micro-enterprise development/self-employment assistance. There is some evidence of positive impacts for older and better-educated workers.

South African post-apartheid policies focus on production enhancing rather than redistributive elements. In the Presidential Job Summit 1998 and in the Growth and Development Summit 2003, the need for South Africa to expand the SMME sector was identified as a key vehicle for job creation. The resolutions of these two conferences highlighted the role of Black Economic

13 South Africa chose an active rather than passive labour market. Passive labour markets mean the sum of all the measures and services which are designed to ensure that people can subsist during periods of unemployment. The individual measures can be: wage replacement benefits such as unemployment benefit and unemployment assistance in cases of unemployment.

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Employment (BEE)14 in the development of women and the youth. Therefore, South Africa’s adoption of active labour market policies is based on the principle of best practice drawn from other late industrialisers where the emphasis is on production-enhancing elements of social policy highlighting affirmative action, public works programmes, SMMEs as generators of employment and the targeting of women in labour-intensive industries.

2.2 Evolution of Development Corridors and their Impact on Women Workers

Women’s rapid entry into the workplace over the past 16 years appears to have increased their participation in global supply chains especially in the factories located in the Spatial Development Initiatives (SDIs) in South Africa. Therefore, the review of literature on the role of Development Corridors and more recently, SDIs in South Africa, locates gender relations in an historical context within the apartheid Bantustans and post-apartheid development zones.

Rogerson (l993:37) notes that an industrial district was first defined by British economist, Alfred Marshall in l9l9 ‘to describe the geographical clustering of small craft-based companies specialising in the production of particular products and interlinked by tight sub-contracting networks’. He goes further to note that industrial districts have a division of labour of highly specialised firms which both compete and complement each other in the context of territorial agglomeration. Within the South African context, industrial districts are known as Development Corridors. Jourdan (2008:66) points out that Development Corridors were first implemented in Southern Africa as the South African Spatial Development Initiatives after the democratic elections in l994. The NEPAD15 secretariat and African Development Bank16 recently adopted

14 Black economic empowerment is not affirmative action, although employment equity forms part of it. Nor does it aim to take wealth from white people and give it to Blacks. It is essentially a growth strategy, targeting the South African economy's weakest point: inequality. http://www.southafrica.info/business /trends/empowerment/bee.htm. Accessed 30 July 2010.

15 The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)’s primary objectives are to eradicate poverty; to place African countries, both individually and collectively, on a path of sustainable growth and development; to halt the marginalisation of Africa in the globalisation process and enhance its full and beneficial integration into the global economy; and accelerate the empowerment of women.

16 The Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) is one of several development finance institutions in South and Southern Africa. Its purpose is to accelerate sustainable socio-economic development by funding physical, social and economic infrastructure. DBSA’s goal is to improve the quality of life of the people of the region. The Bank plays a multiple role of Financier, Advisor, Partner, Implementer and Integrator to mobilise finance and expertise for development projects. http://www.dbsa.org /Pages/default.aspx. Accessed 6 November 2009.

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Development Corridors as an important tool for configuring, prioritising and promoting interrelated infrastructure and large-scale economic sectoral investments as a means to promote trade and investment-led economic growth (Jourdan 2008:66). Economic growth optimising the utilisation of infrastructure encourages value-added processing (beneficiation) and enhances the competitiveness of African countries. For example: the Maputo Development Corridor of which the N4 Toll Road functions as a transport corridor was first conceptualised as a rehabilitation project for an existing transport corridor but was later expanded to incorporate the economic sectors within the geographical location into the Spatial Development Initiative (Jourdan 2008:67).

Spatial Development Initiatives are premised on the assumption that major infrastructural undertakings by government will stimulate economic activity within targeted areas. One of the major objectives of the Spatial Development Corridors is to ensure that the impact of investment is maximised in terms of job creation, economic growth and the greater participation of the ‘historically disadvantaged communities’ in the economic life of South Africa (Mitchell l998). Linked to this initiative is government’s commitment to broader social development through a targeted procurement programme (supply chain) which promotes Black economic empowerment by promoting SMMEs17 as a means for income generation. Within the South African context, Hart (2004:195) states that labour-intensive industrial production in the l980s is inextricably bound to two key thrusts of apartheid spatial and racial engineering that intersected in complex ways with capitalist imperatives and with gendered livelihood strategies. The first of these thrusts was the displacement of millions of Black South Africans from the land and from urban areas in the preceding 20 years and the creation of huge townships with urban-like densities in mainly rural areas designated as Bantustans. Simkins (l983) calculates that the number of Africans living in the Bantustans grew from 4,2 million (39% of all Africans in l960) to over 11 million in l980 (52,7%). He further states that between l980-1986 more recent estimates indicate that an additional 1,6 million Africans ‘disappeared’ from rural White South Africa. Secondly, these industrial estates were located in desolate patches of veld, and many of them were separated

17 This approach is part of the Ministry of Public Works’ Ten Point Plan aimed at promoting an enabling environment for SMMEs and emerging businesses to participate in government procurement programmes introduced by the Ministry of Finance and Public Works, such as the Ten Point Plan to prevent the perpetuation of inequitable procurement awards post-1994. Also see Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act no. 20854 of 2000. http://www.info.gov.za/view/ DownloadFileAction?id=68218. Accessed 11 December 2009.

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from former White towns and smaller cities by what apartheid planners called buffer zones. These densely populated estates grew rapidly and were located near relocated townships within commuting distance of former White towns (Hart 2004). These factories in the fields became new growth poles of localised industrial complexes.

Many industrial complexes were fragile and distorted because they depended on state incentives. They were composed of sectors of industries which faced the most severe international competition – cloth and small electronics assembly – and forms of production least likely to develop sustainable local linkages, spin-offs or local purchasing (Pickles l991). Pickles (l991:74) states that balancing the norms of production and the norms of consumption in a racially-based system of social and economic reproduction proved to be extremely difficult in South Africa in the l970s especially following the social upheavals after Soweto in l976 and the deteriorating position of South African manufacturing in international markets. The rapid growth of decentralised industrial estates in the l980s represented the culmination of 20 years’ of efforts by the apartheid state functionaries to lure industries to the borders of the Bantustans. The battery of influx-control legislation, including the Group Areas Act (No. 41) of 1950, extended the provisions of the Natives Land Act (No. 27) of 1913, and subsequent laws divided South Africa into separate areas for Whites and Blacks (including Coloureds), and gave the government the power to forcibly remove people from areas not designated for their particular racial group. This was in accordance with Hendrik Verwoerd’s grand vision of apartheid preventing Africans from living in urban areas and relocating them to ‘independent’ self-governing Bantustans and was at the heart of this industrialisation policy. Border industries were exempt from minimum wages under the industrial council system and border industry incentives included transport subsidies and tariff protection to companies located in these areas. At the end of the l960s border industries were combined with independent Bantustans where forced removals and farm evictions were producing massive concentrations of dispossessed people.

The Physical Planning and Utilisation of Resources Act of l967 placed strict controls on the industrial expansion in the main metropolitan areas while stepping up incentives for industrialists to relocate to Bantustans and border areas. The l970s witnessed relatively large-scale heavy industries with predominantly male workforces being relocated in areas adjacent to rapidly expanding Bantustans. In l981, spatial policies were becoming discredited in most of the capitalist world by the rise of neoliberalism. In addition, P.W Botha’s ‘reformist’ administration proposed a

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new regional strategy. The new Regional Industrial Development Programme (RIDP) subsidies were graded according to locations with ‘industrial development points’ in more distant Bantustan locations receiving higher levels than the de-concentration points on the peripheries of major urban areas (Hart 2004). Ciskei, a Bantustan located in the Eastern Cape, added extra incentives such as extended tax holidays, thereby creating what was considered as one the most generous incentive packages in the world. These incentives were financed by windfall revenues from the sharp rise in gold prices in the early l980s.

A similar argument is proposed by Pickles (l991), who states that by l979 three different interrelated forms of regional policies had arisen. Firstly, the intra-urban segregation of space, where controlled entry into the cities has been achieved by the linked policies of influx control from the rural to the urban areas, forced removals of Black people from urban areas to homelands, and rigid, at times draconian measures for policing residency rights through Pass Laws in the urban areas. Secondly, territorial disaggregation of the broader South Africa into a series of racially defined ‘homelands’ aimed at leaving the marginal, independent and self-governing national states politically and socially independent from, but economically dependent on, the economically wealthy White South Africa. The only link between Black and White spaces in this plan was intended via the demand of the labour market where Black workers were to be allowed to enter White areas only if, and for as long as, their labour was needed. At the end of their employment contract period, or if their labour was no longer required, Black workers were to return to their homes until such time as their labour was needed once more. Throughout the l960s, the gradual collapse of homeland subsistence agriculture and the increasing marginalisation of their broader economies resulted in renewed attempts to stem the flow of migrants from rural to urban areas. Thirdly, the so-called Border Industries Policy sought to stimulate industrial employment on the border of homelands areas, and to create an intermediate group of migrant workers – the officially designed cross-border commuters – as a spatially organised buffer in order to further the urbanisation of Black workers.

Amidst mounting criticism, the apartheid government appointed a panel of experts to evaluate the regional development programmes, and the resultant studies indicate that the programmes effectively led to capital-intensive investment projects in decentralised areas because the establishment grant (for relocated industries) increased as the level of investment in machinery increased. This had the contrary effect to the intended policy because it provided an incentive for

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manufacturers to invest in machinery rather than additional labour. Consequently, the restructuring of state and industrial policies in the late l970s and l980s provided a response to increasing power of an increasingly well-organised labour force, but also a pro-active restructuring of conditions of accumulation in response to rising power of industrial unions and increases in costs of production (Pickles l991). These local developments evolved alongside the restructuring of international and regional economies confronted with redefining social relations of production to reorganise labour processes in order to increase the pace of work as they switched from import substitution to export-oriented industrialisation. Consequently, apartheid South Africa was characterised by significant spatial inequalities in the level of economic development and degree of industrialisation. Apartheid industrial decentralisation policies misallocated resources that distorted the locational decisions of industries.

2.3 The Role of Development Corridors as an Employer of Women

2.3.1 The Feminisation of Work in the Apartheid Bantustans

Literature on women working in the decentralised zones of the apartheid era abounds with accounts of the horrible and dehumanising conditions of employment for women working in the factories located in these industrial districts. The evidence suggests that Black women bore the brunt of the wretched apartheid policies of South Africa in general and the homeland policy in particular because women’s working lives were framed by the hostile political and economic reality of their existence. Gender oppression and its root causes, is part of the legacy of how the labour market was constructed under apartheid where the multiple burdens of gender, race and class discrimination consigned women, especially Black women, to the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder (Lemmer l989). Lemmer (l989:5) draws our attention to what she refers to as the conjugal attitudes toward women’s role. In this context men are regarded as the household head and breadwinner of the family, which it is argued entitles them to higher wages and better conditions of service. Bozzoli (l98l) argues that the subordinate roles of women lie within beliefs, values and culture of society. Thus to challenge patriarchy, to dispute the idea that men should be dominant figures in the family, is to be seen not as fighting against male privilege but as attempt to destroy African tradition, or subvert the Afrikaner ideal. Thus patriarchal concepts and conservative economic policies underpinned the formation of the industrial districts.

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While many of these policies are considered a major planning debacle due to the fact that it had failed dismally in its overall objectives, it did play a critical role in generating jobs for women employed in a number of decentralised areas. African women’s entry into the industrial wage labour force reconfigured power relations within and between households (Hart 2004:200). In the Bantustans, a woman was the household head because her spouse worked as a migrant on the mines. Confronted by this reality, orthodox economists note that women and men make decisions about their paid and unpaid work activities in the context of constraints (Redclift and Sinclair l991). This could include acknowledging that there are a limited number of available paid jobs. Consequently the variables related to parenting and levels of education affected how the choices are made by women and men. In the context of the South African Bantustans, the decision to perform these dehumanised jobs could have been forced on Black women. Therefore, women made choices within the context of unequal power relations because some of the inequalities were politically motivated and women had no choice. According to Hart (2004), these appalling wages and working conditions in decentralised industries demonstrated the contradictory character of these jobs. These badly paid jobs gave Black women room to manoeuvre in the context of influx control restrictions on mobility, access to an economically independent life and provided an alternative to worse alternatives like domestic labour and work on White farms (Hart 2004:200). Women were able to live with their children while their husbands lived in single-sex hostels in the cities. However, these rapidly increasing jobs were at the expense of women employed in the metropolitan areas since firms that traditionally employed women in clothing and textile relocated to the decentralised economic zones alternately known as SDIs.

The post-apartheid typology on economic zones evolved over the past decade and SDIs are an important aspect of active labour market policies for employment creation or the creation of a Black entrepreneurial class. The developing discourse on this form of economic zone acknowledges that these were established within a development paradigm framed by the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP, l994), and became a support pillar of the Growth Employment and Redistribution macro-economic strategy (Republic of South Africa l996). As economic zones are part of South Africa’s new industrial strategy, it focuses on the economy in two ways: firstly, it focuses on industrial clusters and secondly, on a spatial level it targets certain geographical areas. Three different types of economic zones have been identified and are being investigated or implemented. These include: regional industrial, mixed industrial, and agro-tourism SDIs. According to one of its architects, these are aimed at unlocking the development

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potential of certain areas as part of a paradigm shift towards developing industrial competitiveness, regional co-operation and a more diversified ownership base of the South African economy (Jourdan et al. l996:3). The methodology calls for a limited timeframe of central government involvement. It is a strategic attempt by the state, in partnership with the private sector, to unlock inherent economic potential in special spatial locations in Southern Africa.

The initiatives were located in certain policies of the Department of Trade and Industry and these were concretised into the framework for SDIs because of their potential for local and international investment and employment creation (Jourdan et al. l996). Because these are conceived as short-term interventions, the SDI methodology facilitates short periods of intensive cooperation across departments and tiers of government in targeted geographical areas. The timeframe for the set-up phase is five years and the initial work plan culminates in the handover of responsibility for continuing work in progress to the national and provisional authorities (Crush and Rogerson, 2001:88). In other words, SDIs aim to be short-term and targeted attempts to stimulate growth by creating local competitive spatial entities via new investment, infrastructural development and employment creation. Although this is a ‘top-down’ approach to economic growth and development, national government involvement is restricted primarily to initiating the SDI process by providing expertise for feasibility studies to create employment or small business opportunities for local inhabitants. The rehabilitation of the N4 Toll Road as a transport corridor created opportunities for women to bid for contracts related to this project both as employers and employees.

2.3.2 Catalysts for Employment Creation for Historically Disadvantaged Persons

The post-apartheid discourse on the role of SDIs provides an attempt to make a radical break from the conceptualisation of development associated with apartheid policies. According to the Department of Trade and Industry, Spatial Development Corridors should be contextualised within the new policy paradigm which is to move away from the protected and isolated approach to economic development towards one in which international competitiveness, regional co-operation and more diversified ownership base is paramount18. The national economic policy’s

18 www.thedti.gov.za. Accessed 6 November 2009

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emphasis on fiscal austerity places severe constraints on public spending, largely explains the aggressive private investment-orientation of the SDI programme designed to facilitate global competitiveness, access to global capital infrastructural development and sustainable job creation. Moreover, the SDI programme also incorporates explicit objectives of economic empowerment of local Black inhabitants who were excluded from wealth creation, namely business ownership for example, because of apartheid policies privileging a minority section of the population who had access to financial capital, the best land and other resources. These new forms of economic zones indicate that job creation and investment strategies are central to the new paradigm adopted by the government of South Africa. As the Arkwright et al. (l998) study indicates the objectives of SDIs are firstly to generate sustainable economic growth and development in relatively under-developed areas, according to the inherent economic potential of the locality and secondly, to generate long-term sustainable employment creation for the local inhabitants of the SDI area and for the nation in general. An important objective of SDIs is that of economic empowerment for the inhabitants of these geographical areas. SDIs aim to target poor areas, while stimulating small enterprise, and the use of local labour, but they also take place in highly skewed distribution of assets which immediately raises doubts regarding the extent to which growth can benefit the poor if this inequality is not resolved (Kepe et al. 2001:1).

Literature on SDIs reveals that historically, economic zones are useful for trade policy focused on export-oriented promotion and demonstrate an attempt to reorganise spatial patterns implemented by the apartheid state with an industrial policy of reconfiguring manufacturing investment and promoting industrial decentralisation. Unlike the apartheid homeland policy, which dictated industrial decentralisation from the urban heartland to the rural veld, these new initiatives promote economic growth and employment creation in an attempt to abolish the artificial divide between urban and rural development. Central to this policy are several development programmes, which include amongst others, economic industrial zones or geographical industrial development zones. This grand exercise in spatial re-engineering according to its architects will reconfigure spatial patterns that create a new industrial cartography denuded of Bantustans and decentralised industrial growth points (Jourdan et al. 1996). Thus, the new dispensation pays little heed to the relics of apartheid social engineering. Moreover, there are continuities, especially in the idea that spatial engineering could be the key to successful economic growth (Crush and Rogerson 2001:84).

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Notwithstanding the above, job creation is pivotal to South Africa’s approach in the Development Corridors and by adopting active labour market policies to address either skills training, direct job creation or subsidies, and improved job matching. South African policymakers appear to be cognisant of the constraints faced by Black women and men because of apartheid policies prohibiting them from accessing apprenticeships or skills training in an industry of choice (Avirgan et al. 2005). The authors note that the Skills Development Act was introduced in 1998, which developed mechanisms to address the skills mismatch of the existing skills body with the demands of an export-oriented policy. A series of training programmes and workplace-based learning and financial incentives were introduced to stimulate on-the-job training. A central component of the Skills Development Act addressed the introduction of new forms of skills acquisition through ‘learnerships and skills programmes’ administered through the National Skills Development Strategy, which provides a framework to coordinate workforce development. The Skills Development Levies Act of 1999 instituted a programme to collect levies for skills training under the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs)19. The SETAs were charged with promoting and organising training on a sectoral basis and not within industries. The SETA training programmes allow individuals who are not formally employed within a particular industry to gain access to training and skills development, and the programmes are sufficiently flexible to include small businesses and provide opportunities to the unemployed (Avirgan et al. 2005:30). For women targeted by government programmes in the different industries in Development Corridors, this appeared as an opportunity to upgrade or have skills learnt in the domestic sphere recognised and certified.

Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the theories on women and work are important because these explain how women and men are perceived in the workplace. As Redclift and Sinclair (l991:8) note that unlike the orthodox economic models that focus on the analysis of labour market interactions given the existing distribution of resources and power, a comprehensive understanding aims to examine the nature of such inequality and its effects upon labour market behaviour. Workers are located in a segmented or dual labour market

19 The Skills Development Levies Act mandated a contribution by employers of 0.5% of monthly payroll for the year commencing April 1, 2000. The levy was increased to 1% of payroll in April 1, 2001. Every employer registered for PAYE or that has an annual payroll in excess of R250 million must pay the levy. The levies contribute to on-the-job training and workforce development initiatives, which are overseen by inspectors under the SETA (Avirgan et al 2005).

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where the primary sector of the labour market receive higher wages, have better working conditions, more stable work and better promotion possibilities with union bargaining reinforcing their position. Workers in the secondary labour market are subjected to lower wages, poor working conditions in more vulnerable jobs with no prospect of promotion. Within the South African post-apartheid context, the majority of the population, with the exception of Black artisans were located in the secondary labour market. The intersection of race and gender, created a large Black population with inferior education but more importantly, the apartheid legislation excluded the majority from creating a career.

However, labour theorists do not explain why the majority of the workers in the internal or primary labour market are men yet they do explain why almost all women are employed in the secondary or external labour market as discussed hereafter (Redclift and Sinclair l991).

Labour market theorists believe that women find themselves in the secondary labour market because they are employed in occupations such as teaching, nurturing and caring where required traits are associated with mothering. Women’s caring roles or reproductive roles within the family should be considered in relation to their productive roles. For Black women racial classification creates a division amongst women. White women, until recently were paid higher wages for the same job, than their Black counterparts. The gendering of the workplace is replicated in the home and is the context in which the labour market functions. Labour market theorists suggest that the segregation of the labour market is as a result of the neoclassical approach or human capital theory which relates women’s low wages to the level of education, training and skill (Redclift and Sinclair l991:5) notwithstanding the fact that women and men participate in the labour market in different ways because the former enters the workplace as unequal to the latter. Therefore, human capital theorists explain women’s lower wages as directly linked to women’s lower education and training. However, if jobs are linked to occupations rather than individuals then the person with higher educational qualifications will more than likely enjoy higher paid jobs because they have acquired more human capital. Nevertheless, this theory does not account for the bias in labour market segmentation that encourages women to do women-like jobs like teaching, nursing, seamstresses, knitting, sewing or caring and for men to perform jobs which require mathematics and analytical skills. Therefore, societal stereotypes determine how men and women are defined in terms of the perception of skills in relation to rates of pay.

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A criticism of this theoretical perspective is that it examines women as an undifferentiated group without an understanding of the relationship between the labour market and home. Moreover, the racialised labour market also differentiates White women’s access to better work and improved pay rates compared to their Black counterparts. Therefore, dual labour market theory has limitations when explaining why the labour market is gendered but also appears to explain how inequalities between women and men are defined in the labour market (Redclift and Sinclair l991). Despite these limitations, it is the gendering of the labour market that informs policy and legislation. Nevertheless, dual labour market theory explains the nexus between race, class and gender within the South African context where employers’ patriarchal behaviour has become institutionalised as an important component of the history of industrialisation in South Africa. According to UNRISD Report (2010:40) the apartheid state discouraged the emergence of an integrated national economy which resulted in industrial firms and farm owners opting for capital intensive methods by investing in sophisticated machinery requiring few skilled technicians and a small labour force. This strategy worsened unemployment, poverty and inequality, which the present government has not been able to reverse. Approximately 27% of all South Africans are unemployed of which a large proportion is African, especially women, while the few Black women with employment continue to be located in the lower echelons of teaching, nursing and social work with low wages and poor conditions of service (UNRISD 2010:4). The unemployment rate in South Africa is amongst the highest in the world.

2.3.3 Feminisation of the Labour Market in Development Corridors

The jobs being created in these economic zones are linked to public works programmes and labour-based activities. This approach projected that 100 000 new jobs would be created each year through a labour-intensive response to infrastructural development and service provision. Globally, these economic zones have been established as industrial areas exempt from paying prescribed minimum wages and meeting conditions of employment and/or from meeting internally accepted environmental standards. In addition, host governments also provide various tax incentives to firms located in these economic zones. The products of these firms are geared towards export markets. Bond (2005:66) notes that EPZ-type local economic development is fierce because cities often bid against each other to provide financial concessions, opportunities for environmental degradation, labour law deregulation, and the exploitation of unorganised

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women, in particular. The employment of young, unmarried women in EPZs is based on the cause-and-effect reflections of their vulnerability:

Women constitute a cheaper labour force, due to existing wage differentials;

Women are perceived as more docile than men and more willing to accept tough conditions and monotonous and repetitive work;

Women are perceived to possess ‘nimble fingers’ which enhance their manual dexterity and adaptability to the textiles and electronics sectors that are predominant in EPZs;

Women’s involvement in trade unions is minimal and traditional ways of recruiting membership have not been effective, partly due to the male dominance of trade union leadership, which results in the neglect of issues that affect women; and

Women are perceived as secondary wage earners, and are hence easily disposable, given the flexibility required in a strategy so susceptible to frequent demand shifts (Nababsing 1997).

Humprhys and Nel’s (1999:280) review of South African legislation and policies supports government’s commitment to broader social development by providing local authorities with mandates to engage in local economic development. Sections 152 C and 153 (a) of The Constitution (l996) stipulate that local government must promote social and economic development and that it must structure and manage its administration, budgeting and planning processes in order to give priority to the basic needs of the community and to promote the social and economic development of the community. The different roles and functions of local government feature prominently in a battery of laws and policies which, amongst others recommend strategies to facilitate the growth of Small Medium Enterprises and the Spatial Development Initiative programme. The advent of more egalitarian workplace legislation for South African workers in general and women in particular also brings forth contradictions as the flexibilisation of the labour market in the Development Corridors is likely to constrain the implementation of gender-sensitive workplace policies. Drawing on experiences of Export-Processing Zones (EPZ) in other countries, critics have expressed concern regarding the implications of the economic zones for the economy of South Africa in general and its effect on women in particular. Often women are targeted for work in labour-intensive programmes of road

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building or component manufacturing factories. As of 1995, an estimated 27 million jobs had been created in Export-Processing Zones alone, 70-80% of which were held by women employed under harsh working conditions (Carr and Chen 2004:6).

Rogerson (l999) views Industrial Development Zones (or for that matter SDIs) as a ‘new concept for employment creation’ and is marketed as ‘South Africa’s 21st century investment destination’. He is quick to indicate that these must not be confused with the notion of an Export Processing Zone such as is found in many developing countries (Rogerson 1999:257). Proponents, especially the business sector, confirm this view when they argue that industries located in the economic zones would result in job creation and the development of infrastructure such as housing and roads, for example. In addition, advocates in favour of economic zones argue that these economic zones would crowd in investment and subsequently enhance the competitiveness of the South African economy. The initiatives are seen as a vital mechanism for the integration of the South African economy into the global economy after years of sanctions-imposed isolation. What this integration means for internal development and job creation is debatable particularly since government aims to address poverty and job creation through its public works programme, in conjunction with the private sector.

As McCord (2005) states, the reliance placed on public works to deliver significant responses to critical challenges of poverty, unemployment and growth in the current South African anti-poverty and employment policy discourse invites exploration. According to Desai (2010:57) the South African expanded public works programme which mandates a third of the jobs for women have been successful in increasing women’s livelihoods, which has resulted in better education and health outcomes for children. Infrastructure-related employment is mainly in the field of construction. According to Bond (2005:67) infrastructure development is considered to be the engine for job creation. He goes further to state it is not only the number and remuneration of jobs but the increasing quality of employment and depth of skills workers bring to their work. There are many economic benefits that flow from literacy and productivity of citizens especially the multiplier effect on the quality of life. (Bond 2005). Forstater (l999) agrees with this viewpoint. However, social policy that is aimed at redressing the racial and gender imbalances of the past has also opened the floodgates for the flexibilisation of the labour market for short-term contract employment in public works programmes or casual employment based in the Development

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Corridors. Many of the new economic zones are located in the former homelands and the establishment of these Development Corridors is the subject of debate in South Africa.

At the heart of this insight is the shift in government’s economic strategy which no longer disguises but appears to promote flexibilisation of labour markets in Development Corridors. This is in contradiction to the new workplace policy framework which includes legislation such as the Labour Relations Act (LRA) and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA). This legislation shifts workplace relations from an adversarial to a more consensual framework for negotiating industrial peace in South Africa. The plethora of new workplace legislation aimed at redressing the racial and gender imbalances created by apartheid job reservation policies, especially the exclusion of women from certain industries and the right to protection for farm and domestic workers, may also become a gateway towards the flexibilisation of the labour market20. Critics of the new economic zones in South Africa, especially trade unions, indicate that these would perpetuate the legacy of apartheid labour market policy which was segmented and segregated by skills, race and sex. The majority of women were (and remain) concentrated in the secondary labour market in clerical, clothing and textile manufacturing. The flexibilisation of standards and conditions of employment in Development Corridors pose serious challenges for trade unions. This factor coupled with the difficulties of organising contract and part-time workers in these poorly resourced areas undermines the aims of the trade union movement for decent work, good quality jobs and better conditions of employment, especially for women. As Hosking and Jauch (l997) note, the new geographical economic zones are being established in some of the poorest provinces with little infrastructure and where the unemployment rate is as high as 33%. Government’s response has been to attract investment to the underdeveloped areas.

Special investor-friendly packages have been introduced, focusing on non-fiscal incentives and institutional support to improve the space’s pulling power vis-à-vis new investments. In an assessment of the economic zones and SDIs in general, an important question centres on when a project is regarded as SDI-induced and when not. Furthermore it is important to ask over what time period one is able to assess SDI-generated investment projects. These are important

20 Increasing labour market flexibility, a key characteristic of globalisation, has generated differentiation and fragmentation of different categories of workers. A consequence is that the different categories of workers perceive themselves as having different interests because some have permanent contracts while others are casual workers.

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questions to consider in so far as they reflect investor concerns related to spatial risk/return factors and the impact of demonstration effects which may take considerable time to provide the required trigger to local and perhaps more importantly, foreign direct investment. According to the SDI website, this economic zone is made up of the following actual and potential project areas: fishing and mari-culture (projects and a mix of South African and export markets including tourism projects) aimed at domestic and international markets (Bek and Taylor 2001:68). For women living in this geographical area the opportunities for employment in the projects have the potential to demonstrate that government policies are realistic and focused on empowering women.

2.4 Conclusion

Translating social policy commitments into practice contains several contradictions, each of which involves slightly different sets of issues and uses varying connotations of gender equality. The disjuncture between policy intentions and implementation can mask the complicated ways in which gender relations intersect with social relations of class and race. The language of post-apartheid social policy is more inclusive and has attempted to place people at the centre of its policy framework. However, this has not been without contradictions because the South African economy is part of the globalising world and Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy prioritised flexibilisation as its major thrust for employment processes. The rapid increase in women’s participation in the economy located them in precarious insecure work, often in public works programmes or SMMEs. The focus on specific elements of the active labour market policies channelled women into categories of employment creation or income generation that falls outside the regulated labour market. The Development Corridors, such as Spatial Development Corridors as post-apartheid phenomena conceptualised to fast track and kick start the economy, have ambitious plans to create employment for the local inhabitants. By developing a network structure of industries, the intention is to create employment for local participants who would also be decision-makers in the process. Local participation would also encourage women to participate in this process both as decision-makers and participants in the local industries. Therefore, Spatial Development Initiatives have been established in order to reconfigure the apartheid cartography and thereby provide an opportunity for women to participate in the local economy. Nevertheless, this reconfiguration takes place against the background of a labour market that has become increasingly casualised with the majority of women in the secondary

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labour market earning low wages with poor working conditions, reminiscent of women’s work in the apartheid Bantustans. Therefore, post-apartheid South Africa’s active labour markets encourage women to enter casualised work or to become SMME owners in a period of increasing unemployment.

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CHAPTER 3: DEVELOPING A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF MARGINALISATION

3.1 Introduction

Targeting women in employment creation projects is positively encouraged by the active labour market policies of the post-apartheid South African government in the hope that the entry of women into these male-dominated industries will challenge the stereotype and create a more gender equal workplace. This chapter also poses the question of whether women are marginalised from the mainstream of the labour market where workers have full-time employment with benefits. The debate on active labour markets where women SMME owners generate employment for the previously disadvantaged will be raised. This will be followed by the feminisation of the work process. Central to this discussion is whether women’s participation in lowly-paid employment contributes to their emancipation21 and consequently to gender equality22. The fourth section examines feminisation of work as introducing labour-intensive production. The final section develops a theoretical framework on the status of women in casualised work or short-term contracts as SMME owners.

3.2 Women Move from the Margins to the Centre of the Theoretical Debate on Work

Functionalists, like Parsons, consider the family to be an organic unit central to the survival of society (Rees l992:23). For functionalists, the family provides a secure environment for procreation and child rearing. Within the context of the family, women are considered best suited to carrying out roles of caregivers while men are the breadwinners. This division of labour has consequences for men and women’s relative marketability. As men accrue more experience in the workplace they develop a competitive edge. While women focus on nurturing they take time out of the labour force, they gain fewer marketable skills than men. Women who are less skilled take the comparatively poorly paid jobs. Economic human capital theory is informed by this notion

21 Emancipation describes various efforts to obtain political rights or equality, often for a specific disenfranchised group. The concept of emancipation is linked here to the South African Constitution and Bill of Rights that accord women the right to equality before the law in all spheres of life.

22 Equality includes equal rights under the law, such as safety, voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and the extension of property rights. The concept of gender equality is linked to equality between men and women within a particular society.

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because the household is the basic economic unit and therefore considers that men invest in their ‘human capital’ by acquiring skills, qualifications and experience (Rees l992:23). Women by contrast focus on care of the children and home and fit employment around their domestic responsibility. The ideology of family appears to have permeated all facets of the workplace and society.

Feminists have alternate viewpoints of women’s role in the labour market. Liberal feminists have focussed on explaining inequality by identifying barriers to women’s full access to opportunities in the labour market (Rees l992:25). Liberal feminists focus on legislation – for example, equal pay and removal of more obvious forms of sex discrimination, but do not fundamentally challenge the status quo (ibid). This theoretical approach seeks positive action measures to facilitate equal access for women to the existing system. Marxist feminism focuses on women’s important role in capitalist production as bearing and rearing the next generation of the labour force and servicing the needs of the male worker (Rees l992:26). Patriarchy is a by-product of capitalist production where women are considered a reserve army. Socialist feminists like Walby (2007) view patriarchy and capitalism as a dual system which oppresses women. The existence of patriarchy in the economic system other than capitalism, allows the former to be seen as changing and dynamic. According to Rees (l992:31) radical feminists focus on the concept of patriarchy and that the prime beneficiary of women’s oppression are men. Therefore, radical feminists have focussed on patriarchal relations of the family (domestic labour) and the private sphere rather than on the labour market and the public sphere (Humm 1989:247). A criticism of radical feminism is the emphasis on commonalities amongst women which over time has changed. Postmodernists and Black feminists charge radical feminists of not considering differences amongst women (Rees l992:31). Women’s participation in the workplace may not be experienced as equals. For example: Coloured women may not experience casualised work as oppressive as class relations or racism by White men and women. In other words, Coloured women take poorly paid jobs where no other exists. This is experienced differently from a differential in pay rates based on race.

Post-modernist or deconstructive feminists according to Jackson and Pearson (1998:12) are concerned with investigating the elemental make-up of these theories including Marxism and Liberalism. A deconstructivist approach aims to interrogate the connections between gender and development or work to provide an analytical syntax which will provoke future debate. They focus

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on equal pay, opportunities for promotion, training and career development through workplace hierarchies which could all be linked to women’s priorities such as flexible hours and leave, protection of reproductive health, freedom from harassment and appropriate non-wage benefits recognised by both management and unions (Pearson 2007:202). The debates regarding the manner in which women are incorporated into the labour market have importance for women’s emancipation from economic dependence on their spouses or families.

3.3 Women’s Entry into the Workplace Creates Feminisation of Work

The marginalisation of women living in the developing world has its roots in the l940s when women were excluded from the development discourse. The feminist author, Esther Boserup epitomised this position, in her path-breaking study published in l970 in which she argues that women’s labour becomes displaced as production is transferred from the household to the factory. Boserup (2007) further states that men, who are better educated and less burdened by family responsibilities are much more likely to benefit from the specialisation of labour and the hierarchical structure of the labour force.

With the rapid inclusion of women in export-led production, Elson and Pearson (l981) developed the debate by interrogating the relations through which women are incorporated into development processes, but also explored the new possibilities and challenges that arise in the employment of Third World 23 women (Elson and Pearson l981). This view has its roots in what Pearson (1998:l72) refers to as the classic consensus that ‘industrialisation marginalised women’. Some 30 years have passed since the publication of this seminal text, but these ideas are still relevant for late industrialising countries like South Africa. Women’s position has altered as countries on the African continent gained independence and women gained the vote. Equality incorporates several meanings amongst others, the idea that no individual should be less equal in opportunity or in human rights than any other (Humm 1989:63). This process of formal emancipation continues to evolve towards the empowerment of women as they are increasingly employed in paid employment. Empowerment, according to March et al. (l999:60):

23 In discussing the industrialisation process, I refer to South Africa as a developing country as referred to in Chapter 2.

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‘…is an approach articulated by Southern women. (Empowerment) ... is an approach where women through supporting their own initiatives thus, fostering self-reliance. Women’s subordination is seen not only as a result of male oppression, but also as a consequence of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. The empowerment approach also recognises that women’s experience is very varied, tempered by factors such as class, race, age, and so on.’

March et al. (l999:60) go further to note the centrality of power – asserting that ‘women have to

get more of it’. For Kabeer (l994) empowerment is the expansion of people’s ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied them. Kabeer goes further to note that empowerment is control over resources: physical, human intellectual and financial. Ideology – values and beliefs is an important dimension of the definition of empowerment. Kabeer (l999) develops the notion of empowerment further to include women’s agency – i.e. the right to make choices and should be involved in determining which choices make the most sense for them and their families. There are other elements of empowerment which include processes that involve change over time and outcomes such as improvement in education, health and economic and political participation (Desai 2010:6). Therefore, feminists focus on the structural and collective nature of empowerment by conceptualising empowerment as women within (or conscientisation) power with others and power to transform unjust social structures and institutions. Desai goes further when she recognises that women have a right to determine their lives without making them responsible for their own empowerment (Desai 2010:7). This thesis adopts this approach by focusing on the collective as well as the structural nature of inequality and that empowerment of women in the industrialisation process is multileveled and multidimensional.

Consequently, women’s rapid entry into the industrialisation process not only empowered them, in several ways which will be unpacked in this thesis, but also feminised the labour force. Standing (l989) refers to this debate as the feminisation of labour activity, and that the type of work, labour relations, income and insecurity associated with ‘women’s work’ has been spreading. This results notably in the globalisation of work and the concomitant rise in female labour force participation and a decline in men’s employment as well as a transformation of many jobs traditionally held by men (Pearson l998:176). The feminisation of a particular occupation or profession is regarded as an effect of deskilling and this process is discussed. As Rees (l992:17) argues, the concept of skill is socially constructed and does not only depend upon which sex performs the task involved but also on how those skills were obtained. The acquisition of skills

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through education, training or experience is valued and rewarded more than talent thought to be innate or skills learned on the job (Rees 1992:17). Apprentices, who have undergone training as artisans are respected and given status regardless of how outmoded their skills may be. In contrast, women tend to acquire their skills by other means, such as ‘sitting by Nellie24’ and imitating her tutor or participating in in-house training’25. Such training is rarely accredited or valued.

According to Rees (l992:17) even though certain professions such as law and medicine have revised their policies in order to include women, new patterns of gender segregation have emerged which indicate that women do not necessarily enjoy the status, pay and conditions that were previously accrued only to men. Recent studies on women’s economic activity and the value placed on their work have demonstrated how concepts related to work, such as part-time work, unemployment and skills acquisition are predicated upon the task and take as their yardstick male experiences of work. Therefore, women’s work is being measured with a male yardstick. Naussbaum (2001) questions this viewpoint from a human capabilities perspective when she notes that human abilities exert a moral claim that they can be developed and that each person is a bearer of value and of equal worth. If flexibility is the route employed in the labour market, it would need to take cognisance of human capabilities by seeking to develop and harness their value to benefit both employer as well as employee.

Flexibility as a concept is vague and implies different things for employees, employers, trade unions and by gender. According to Standing et al. (l996:6) all stakeholders in South Africa use the concept of labour market flexibility with great alacrity and there is a danger that the concept will remain both ambiguous and a euphemism. In addition to being gendered, labour markets are constructed within a particular context. For employers, flexibilisation refers to the capacity to make workplace changes speedily and at a relatively low cost. For them, there are forms26 and levels of flexibility, which hinge on distinctions between flexibility of working practices, job structures and employment conditions. The latter is the most crucial because employers would like to be able to make changes to employment contracts quickly and easily and in particular to

24 Sitting by Nellie is a normative explanation that a person can learn a skill through learning by doing. 25 This is in-house training or on-the-job training offered by the factory owner. 26 Forms of flexibility have two sub-concepts: functional flexibility which refers to the internal labour market

and secondly, numerical flexibility which refers to changes in the number of workers.

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be able to lay off workers without opposition from trade unions or their representatives (Standing et al. l996:6).

The recent trend for greater employment flexibility in which the extent of regular protected employment has been declining relative to temporary and casual employment, indicates the power of employers to negotiate this process. For those in regular employment, this has resulted in less security of tenure. For workers and their representatives, the notion of labour market flexibility has negative connotations, for example, that of job insecurity. Trade unions regard flexibility with distrust because the concept is viewed as a device for increasing managerial control and for increasing workers’ insecurity (Standing et al. 1996:7; Berger l992:132). The conventional and conservative view is that women’s responsibilities for housework and childcare affect the types of jobs many women prefer, since flexible jobs in terms of hours or part-time work appears more suitable, given relatively easy entry/exit/re-entry enabling women to combine work and family responsibilities with ease (Anker 1998:29). A more radical perspective is that women, like their male counterparts, have equal responsibility for parenting and this shared responsibility will ultimately release women to develop career paths similar to their male counterparts.

Elson (1996) highlights two crucial trends; firstly, that the growth of women’s share of industrial employment often reflects the decline of jobs previously held by men, rather than the substitution of ‘cheaper’ labour. Secondly, that there is nothing intrinsic to the increasing flexibility of employment which leads to an erosion of workers’ rights because it could be a trade-off for workers between maintaining employment opportunities and defending worker rights and employment conditions (Elson l996). The rapid feminisation of certain jobs occurred because the available employment and labour options tend increasingly to characterise activities associated, rightly or wrongly, primarily with women. According to Standing (1999b:583) the type of job could be feminised, or men could find themselves in feminised positions. Women could find themselves in jobs traditionally held by men, or certain jobs could be changed to have characteristics associated with women’s historical pattern of labour force participation. These include the type of contract, the form of remuneration, the extent and forms of security provided, and the access to skills development Moreover, the trend towards feminisation may lead to retrenchment of men and/or subsequent outsourcing of certain services to small enterprises. Therefore, women’s entry into the workplace was facilitated by their capacity as flexible workers in insecure or precarious forms of employment. The current global industrialisation process places demands on women’s

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participation, thereby reinforcing women’s social subordination in a situation where the absence of economic alternatives has been accompanied by the deregulation of labour protection (Elson l996). Consequently, women’s entry into the industrialisation process has been closely associated with the deskilling of the work process accompanied by insecure employment contracts that are poorly remunerated.

3.4 Feminisation of Work Introduces Labour-Intensive Production

Labour-intensive production has always been regarded globally as woman-intensive production. Feminist authors note that the exploitation of women occurs not because they perform ‘unskilled’ jobs as the bearers of inferior labour, but rather that the jobs they perform are ‘unskilled’ because these have already been categorised as inferior and therefore women become bearers of cheap labour (Elson and Pearson l981:24). Moreover, many of these jobs are labour-intensive and are targeted by government as an opportunity to create employment for women. Government policies in both the developing and developed countries encourage women to take these poorly paid jobs rather than encourage women to access social grants. Another perspective is that men vacate these labour-intensive jobs once they have access to better-paid employment (Pearson l998).

Studies on the flexibilisation of work reveal that the initial rapid influx of women employed in export-led industrialisation was constricted when the shift in the labour process became marked by technological change 27 . In addition, this process was coupled with the relocation of international companies for numerous reasons, including the lack of cheap, docile or unorganised labour. This process disadvantaged women who did not have the requisite entry qualifications in order to compete for employment that required certification.

27 Pearson (l998) notes that the Mexican ‘maquiladora’ female workforce declined after l982 in spite of an initial significant growth of overall employment. The decline in the female workforce has a direct link to the introduction of new technology. The increasing masculinisation of production in Mexico included a shift in sectoral production, labour displaced by technological change, the decline in appropriate productivity and the fact that changes in the organisation of production buttressed employers’ need for higher levels of training and trends towards certification.

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3.4.1 The Feminisation of the South African Labour Market

While workers have begun to use their political voice in order to defend their workplace rights, this process takes place against a general crisis of joblessness and unemployment. This combined with women’s rapid entry into the formal labour market, challenged power relations both within the family and the workplace. According to Walby (l990), all women were now in the public patriarchal sphere. The democratisation of society encouraged women to enter employment formerly considered the male domain challenging both private and public sector recruitment strategies. As Casale (2004) notes, legislative labour reforms introducing the Employment Equity Act (l998), the Skills Development Act (l998) and the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act (2003) coincided with a dramatic increase in female labour force participation in South Africa compared to male participation. Casale suggests that this not only indicates an increase in the female population but also an increase in the number of women who had not been economically active in l995, but who were in 2001, either working or waiting to work. Casale observes that an increase in the labour force participation rates for both men and women was expected, but that the increase was considerably higher among women. She purports that women accounted for six out of ten workers employed between l995 -2005. Five of the six women were African (Casale 2004:47). Statistics reveal that in spite of formal equality, racial discrimination continued with White women earning more than their African counterparts (van der Westhuizen et al. 2007). However, Casale’s study notes that African women with tertiary qualifications earned the highest salary (ibid). Women benefited from the increased demand for labour and accounted for 55% of workers employed (ibid). Women found work in unskilled and elementary level employment which is poorly paid. Therefore affirmative action policies that encourage women to enter employment formerly not available to them advantaged White women who benefited largely from policies promoting equality because they had better educational access to management or better paid employment.

Affirmative action policies were exacerbated by the fact that there were not enough jobs to address the increase in demand for employment and unemployment rates among women stood at 47% (Casale 2004, van der Westhuizen et al. 2007). This viewpoint is echoed by Hinks (2003:5) who confirms that there was a simultaneous increase in employment and an increase in unemployment, indicating an increase in the demand for jobs. Consequently, the expanded unemployment rates by gender from l995 and 2002 show the following trends:

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Table 1: Expanded unemployment rates by Gender, l995 and 2002 from Hinks (2003:5)

1995 2002 All Male Female All Male Female Economically active 14 356 10 152 4 204 18 954 9 607 9 343 Expanded unemployment rate 29,3 22,5 38,0 41,8 35,6 48,2 % of unemployed between 15-25 years of age 29,0 31,4 27,1 31,2 32,6 30,0 % of unemployed between 25-35 years of age 39,2 38,2 40,0 39,9 37,9 42,2 Sources: STATSSA Releases, PO317 (l995) and PO21O (2002)

The lack of jobs created during this period, simultaneously created the feminisation of the labour market and is explained by various reasons. According to van der Westhuizen et al. (2007:11), there appears to be a decline in female access to male incomes because there has been an increase in unemployment amongst males. Some of the other reasons include the consequences of the HIV epidemic and an increase in the number of households headed by females due to changes in household structure (van der Westhuizen et al. 2007:11). In addition, the abolition of apartheid laws and introduction of more democratically inclusive legislation contributed towards increasing opportunities for women in the labour market. The bulk of the jobs for women grew in the construction sector, wholesale and retail trade as well as the financial and business services (van der Westhuizen et al. 2007:16).

The nature of work in the globalising world means that the labour market has been shrinking and work has become more informal. Consequently, informality is a process taking place both within the ‘formal’ workplace and outside it. Kimani et al. (2008) notes that this process can be conveniently described as ‘informalisation from above’, as a result of the externalisation of employment (sub-contracting or outsourcing), and ‘informalisation (employment of casual, temporary workers) from below’. The latter refers to the kind of activity traditionally associated with the informal economy (Kimani et al. 2008). This has implications for patriarchal relations which continually change but do not necessarily disappear because Black women are employed in the vulnerable and precarious jobs. The casualised employment contract confirms and reproduces patriarchal relations both at work and home because of these women’s restricted access to the formal labour market.

The globalising process has impacted on the South African workforce. According to von Holdt and Webster (2005), the restructuring of the post-apartheid labour market differentiates the workforce into three zones. First, there is the core; formal sector workers in more or less stable

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employment relations. These individuals have wages, benefits and access to democratic worker and trade union rights. Second, there is the zone of casualised and externalised work, where non-core workers are compelled into less-stable employment relations. Sometimes workers have temporary or part-time contracts with the core enterprise and at other times more precarious contracts as intermediaries such as labour brokers, informal contractors or sub-contractors. The third zone is that of the periphery where people ‘make a living’ through informal-sector activities ranging from those that permit a degree of petty accumulation from subsistence activities to full unemployment (von Holdt and Webster 2005:28). The diagram below illustrates the categorisation of the workforce.

Figure 1: The Flexible Worlds of Work

** From these figures it is not possible to distinguish between temporary, part-time and outsourced work. We include one million domestic workers because of their extreme employment vulnerability. *** The arrows represent the movements of workers between the different ‘worlds of work’, with movement from the periphery and the non-core into the core difficult to achieve. Diagram from Webster and von Holdt (2005:28). Source May and Meth 2004; the Presidency (2003).

Extending this argument, Bezuidenhout et al. (2008) note that one of the causal factors is that people live in the age of insecurity where work has become precarious, uncertain, unpredictable and risky. The risk is increasingly being shifted from employers to employees. Providing a gender

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perspective, Chen (2004:20) notes that there is further informalisation of employment within these broad status categories and that women tend to be employed in different types of activities and associated with different levels of earning than men with the result that they tend to earn less even within specific segments of the informal economy (Chen 2004:20). The author explains the differences by the fact that men tend to have better tools of the trade, operate from better work sites/spaces and have greater access to productive assets and financial capital. Because of this fact, men often produce or sell a higher volume or a different range of goods and services. Chen (2004) goes further to offer examples. For instance, among street vendors in some countries, men are more likely to sell non-perishable goods while women are more likely to sell perishable goods (such as fruits and vegetables). In addition, men are more likely to sell from push-carts or bicycles while women are more likely to sell from baskets on their heads or on the ground, or simply from a cloth spread on the ground. This is also because men are more likely to be heads of family businesses, while women are more likely to be unpaid contributing family members. (Chen 2004).

Another perspective is that of Wichterich (2002:2) who notes that there are advantages of employing women in new export economies. For Wichterich (2002:2) the comparative advantage of employing women in the new export economies is that of low pay without secondary wage-costs, plus weak trade unions and a powerful array of fiscal and investment incentives for employers where second and third zone workers are located. The advantage for employers is that women employed on flexible contracts are responsible for the benefits, which are normally accorded to permanently employed workers. In most developing countries, the formal working population forms a fraction of the population because of the nature of economic development. Consequently, the majority of workers, especially women, work in casual, temporary, flexible and contract employment without job security and work-related benefits. Ozaki (2000) notes that flexible forms of employment contracts have negative consequences for the stability of tenure for the employee. This has the same negative effect on the productivity for the company. Thus, job security and work-related benefits have become privileges available to a relatively small stratum of workers, often mainly men.

In developed economies, according to Orloff (2002) the trend within the division of labour is that of modernising based on the notion that men take on full-time work and women take on part-time work in order to accommodate their domestic work or reproductive roles. The gap between men

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and women’s work reflects the occupational sex segregation, and wage penalty paid by women’s jobs. For Orloff (2002) this factor is a direct result of the concept of the male breadwinner model, which has been institutionalised in varying degrees in the social policy regimes in all Western countries. The gendered assumptions of policymakers regarding family forms and the manner in which this has contributed to the social organisation of care that states (albeit Western states) do not have uniform labour market approaches, but operate at different levels of commitment to a male breadwinner-female housewife household form (Orloff 2002). Within this form, the ideal and typical system would find married women excluded from the labour market, firmly subordinated to their husbands for the purposes of social security entitlements and tax, and expected to undertake the work of caring at home without public support or social benefits. Many of the social benefits of healthcare, unemployment insurance and/or housing subsidies could have been extended over time in developing and rapidly industrialising countries, but since the l980s there has been a global trend in the opposite direction.

Standing (l999b:587) suggests that regular full-time wage labour as the major form of employment is being replaced by a more diverse pattern, characterised by informal employment, through more outworking28, contract labour, casual labour, part-time labour, homework and other forms of unprotected labour as women strive to straddle the domestic and economic divide. Standing further states that informal employment was considered as the traditional form of employment for rural workers. More recently, both industrialised and industrialising countries have witnessed the process in which larger scale enterprises have been informalising their labour process (Standing l999b). In other words, many of the jobs created in order to service global supply chains in today’s economy disavow any responsibility for meeting workers’ needs – including health care, pensions, maternity, leave time, compensation for on-the-job accidents, and workforce training – leaving these up to workers and their families to resolve. Similarly, the removal of most limits on working hours or payment of overtime compensation has particularly burdened women, since women continue to do most of the work to raise children and care for the sick and elderly despite having entered the work force in huge numbers.

28 Work is outsourced or sub-contracted.

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3.5 Towards a Theory of Marginalisation

Based on the foregoing conceptual framework, this section posits that marginalisation is linked directly to specific forms of production and social reproduction and is determined by the construction of gender within a particular society. This is because any attempt to separate the construction of gender from the social world is impossible because gender is not a social given. It is constructed in social ways where the social is both cultural and material. The assertion has been made that the social world is also a material world, which is consistently immersed in inequality, as evidenced against health, life chances and opportunities of entering higher education; which suggests that class positions affect men’s and especially women’s access to opportunities that may or may not alter their positions of inequality (Rees 1992). Often, by minimising their relationship to motherhood, women maximise their integration into the complex world of work, which fails to acknowledge women’s reproductive role as specific roles performed by women. Evans (2003) suggests that without recognising women’s childbearing role, employers disadvantage women by not investing in their career development similar to their male counterparts. Therefore, societal gendering in itself may not involve greater or lesser social rewards but gendering, especially for women in class-specific ways, empathetically does so (Evans 2003:68).

According to Pearson (2007:205), there have been sharp exchanges between feminists because of different viewpoints on whether world market factories offer opportunities for economic independence, or whether workplaces are sites of exploitation of women. Some feminists argue that factory employment offers women the chance to be independent of their families and to have more leverage in household decision making (Pearson 2007). Others conjure up the image of the ‘global sweatshop’ or even a modern day version of Foucault’s electronic ‘Panopticon’29 in order to insist that the work is underpaid, degrading and exploitative. The earlier analysis by Elson and

29 Bentham derived the idea from the plan of a military school in Paris designed for easy supervision, itself conceived by his brother Samuel who arrived at it as a solution to the complexities involved in the handling of large numbers of men. Bentham supplemented this principle with the idea of contract management; that is, an administration by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would have a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality while the design did not come to fruition during Bentham's time, and it has been seen as an important development. For instance, the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern ‘disciplinary’ societies and its pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, the school, the hospital and the factory have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities) stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon. Accessed 13 December 2009

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Pearson in the l980s which indicated that women’s subordination could be intensified, decomposed or recomposed by the construction of a new nimble-fingered female labour force is often sidelined as particular case studies or standpoints provide contrasting evidence and frequently elevate to general conclusions (Pearson 2007:205). Therefore, women’s rapid entry into the labour market since l995 has feminised the South African labour market. This feminisation has created different categories of workers. These are workers who are either part of the core or the periphery of the labour market.

3.6 Conclusion

The nature of work for the majority of women in South Africa since the democratic dispensation has been temporary, casualised work in a rapidly informalising workplace. Therefore, the conceptual framework for Black working class women is that the rapid increase in employment ushered in the flexibilisation of employment contracts in jobs previously occupied by men. These jobs quickly became feminised and devalued both in terms of status and pay scales. Therefore, the feminisation of certain categories of work is poorly paid, temporary or casualised with no associated work-related benefits that accrue to work in a permanent employment contract.

Affirmative action policies provide opportunities for women workers who have become more differentiated based on skill, qualifications and government targeting. Increasingly Black women are being employed as professionals in the public and private sector. Others have acquired tertiary qualifications taking on senior posts at tertiary institutions. These women fall into von Holt and Webster’s (2005) core category of worker. A large proportion of these may be employed or contracted on temporary or outsourced contracts as SMME owners. These would be non-core workers who may migrate to the core employment conditions or vice versa depending on the employment contract. However, the majority of Black women remain casualised in poorly-paid, informal work. The high levels of inequality linked to unemployment force Black women to take poorly paid, public works programmes because no other jobs exist. Government’s targeting of women has marginalised poorly skilled Black men who are socially and culturally considered the head of the family. In a period of globalisation, Black women increasingly perform casualised work or set up SMMEs which appear to be part of the peripheral labour market in the informal economy.

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CHAPTER 4: UTILISING A FEMINIST METHODOLOGY TO STUDY WOMEN IN MALE-DOMINATED EMPLOYMENT

Throughout my career as a feminist sociologist, I have sought to address the following questions: How does a researcher negotiate the power imbalance between the researcher and researched? What responsibilities do researchers have to those they study? How does participatory research influence analytic choices during the research study? How do strategies of self-reflection alter ethnographic practice?

Naples (2003:3)

4.1 Introduction

This chapter explains the methodology I used to investigate whether the promotion of women may be considered career development for categories of Black working women employed in male-dominated industries. The promotion of women in male-dominated jobs is a result of post-apartheid legislation on employment equity and equality of opportunity for women. In addressing the research question, I adopt post-modernist approaches to feminist research. I also argue the benefits of feminist as opposed to mainstream research approaches in Social Sciences because the former ensures that women’s issues are central. Therefore, this chapter approaches the research topic from a feminist30 perspective by raising questions pertaining to who is a knower, which according to Olesen (l994:159), refers to women both as participants and as researchers and as the basis for feminist methodology. The chapter proceeds to discuss feminist epistemology and the methodology which underpins the research, followed by feminist methods and an explanation of the research process and analysis of the findings.

30 There is no single definition of feminist since feminists have many differing affinities – of sexual preference, class, and race. In short, a feminist is a woman who recognises herself, and is recognised by others, as a feminist. That awareness depends on a woman having experienced consciousness-raising, knowledge of women’s oppression, and recognition of women’s differences and commonalities. (Humm l989:75)

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4.2 Epistemology of Location

In Haraway’s ‘Morphing in the Order’ (2004:201) in which she discusses her love for primatology, she states, ‘thus all things must begin, with an act of love’. It is within this context that I relate my passion for researching gender equality. I base this on my own experience of subordination as the eldest daughter in a large working class family. As the eldest it was expected of me to take care of my siblings, and as a girl child I had the additional role of caring for my two female cousins who lived with our family. From the age of 14 years, I worked during the year-end school vacations to finance the purchase of my school uniforms. Throughout my high school years, I worked at various department stores and the small wage earned was my source of pride and independence, particularly when I handed it to my mother every Friday evening. At the time, it was the pride of earning a wage rather than the sum of the money itself which excited me. For me, it signalled a sense of economic and emotional freedom; even if the wage itself became part of the family income. Being raised in a family of limited financial often teaches one an appreciation of the sense of community. The sense of community in turn enabled me to identify with my peers who were engaging in similar endeavours to assist their families to survive in a political context where racial discrimination prevented talented young people from achieving their career aspirations.

Haraway (l991:l88) observes that ‘feminist objectivity is situated knowledge’ and the metaphor of diffraction is utilised as a tool to help imagine a feminist research practice based on interaction, interruption, difference and surprise. I therefore had to deal with my subjectivity when I designed this research project because my own childhood intersected with my current achievements in higher education. This experience of being a working class girl child with little access to a career opportunity that would provide an opportunity commensurate with my abilities did not necessarily afford me a better understanding of the lived experience of the participants whom I interviewed. Naples (2003:37) highlights this point when she asks how the researcher manages the power relationships when (feminists) situate (our) themselves as participant observers in the lives of others and not affect those who are being researched. My initial approach was to engage with respondents eliciting ‘data’ to be deconstructed and reconstructed within a feminist paradigm. But would this leave the respondents unaffected by our interaction? Would respondents view my text as capable of influencing government policymakers?

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The period of designing the project became a time for reflection in my attempt to understand and create meaning of the harsh realities of the women’s and men’s lives; especially those who earn an income in an informalising workplace. While the process was a reminder that my own father had worked as an unskilled worker in the decentralised geographical area of Atlantis on the West Coast, it was his hard work and my mother’s backbreaking job as a housekeeper that reinforced my determination to complete high school. Atlantis is a Coloured township with mainly clothing and engineering components factories. My father travelled long distances from our home in the southern suburbs where we were forcibly relocated – some 120 kilometres back and forth to his workplace – and when his travel allowance had been exhausted he was forced to use his meagre wage towards his travel expenses. Therefore, as a feminist researcher I considered myself a ‘situated knower’ with a defined role and ethical practice. As a family we could identify with many of my father’s work experiences that he related to us over supper at night. The socio-economic circumstances of his work colleagues were similar to those we lived in. However, their lives were harder because a large portion of their wages was used on travel for their families because they lived a distance from supermarkets, schools or churches. As a Coloured child I knew what forced removals from a White residential area felt like or being told that one cannot enter a bus because it was designated for a White group. In sum, there were similarities between the interviewees’ life experiences and mine which gave me insights as a ‘situated knower’.

4.3 Methodology from a Feminist Perspective

The feminist body of knowledge has evolved with the production of knowledge including a shift from ‘woman’ to ‘gender’.31 This viewpoint has historical roots in the evolution of the shift from women to gender studies. The shift also has roots in the different feminist interpretations of the concept of gender. As Haraway suggests that all modern feminist meanings of gender have roots in Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that ‘one is not born a woman’ (Haraway 1991:131 citing de Beauvoir). Simone de Beauvoir (l952:725) notes that ‘woman could not be other than what she was made, and that her past was bound to shadow her for life’. For Haraway (l991:131), feminist

31 Feminist philosophers have become interested in how gender situates knowing subjects and have articulated three main approaches to this question: feminist standpoint theory, feminist postmodernism and feminist empiricism (http:plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology). Accessed 23 April 2010.

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theory and practices around gender seek to explain and change historical systems of sexual difference, where ‘men’ and ‘women’ are socially constituted and positioned in relations of hierarchy and antagonism. Butler’s interpretation of de Beauvoir is that gender is constructed but implied in her formulation of the concept is one of an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender.

The concept of gender for Butler is constructed through:

‘performative acts – we are the gender we act as. We are the gender whose normative qualities we form in and through our actions in daily life. One’s subjectivity, one’s body is gendered through these performances which are compelled by social sanction and taboo. Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; … gender is a function of the heterosexual social contract.’

(Butler l990)

Haraway puts forward a different definition when she states that:

‘Gender is always a relationship not a performed category of beings or a possession that one can have. Gender does not pertain more to woman than to man. Gender is a relation between various constituted categories of men and women (and variously arranged tropes) differentiated by nation, generation, class lineage, color and much else32.

The various explanations of gender by different theorists affect how the concept is used. For the purpose of this research project, the concept of gender is socially constructed. Moreover, the construction of gender is located within the context of contemporary post-apartheid South Africa where numerous progressive policies have been developed in order to eradicate racial discrimination and promote gender equality. While adopting this approach, I am aware of the possible conflation of women’s needs with gender needs. However, the South African discourse utilises the gender and development approach to social policy and my study conforms to this approach.

When I began this research process, the only information available was government policy on Spatial Development Initiatives (SDIs) and the statistics on the projected number of jobs to be

32 www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/quotes. Accessed on 24 June 2010.

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generated for people living in these geographical areas (Jourdan et al. 1996: Mitchell l998). The policies promoted investment as an opportunity to kick-start the economies of the SDIs (www.thedti.gov.za). There was no analysis of workers’ experience of these newly created jobs or the role of women-owned SMMEs. Utilising qualitative research methods, I sought to generate knowledge on the constructions through which women experience and create their perceived identities in relation to government policies that promoted equality. I was reminded of Smith who explains her ‘everyday world’ approach:

‘... is that world we experience directly. It is the world in which we are located physically and socially. Our experience arises in it as conditions, occasions, objects, possibilities, relevance, pretences, and so on, organized in and by the practices and methods through which we supply and discover organization. It is necessarily local – because that is how we must be – and necessarily historical.’

(Smith, D l989:89)

According to Humm (l989:192) the purpose of feminist research is to create theories grounded in the actual experiences and language of women by investigating women’s lives and experiences on their own terms. Liz Stanley, a sociologist, wrote that ‘feminist research is absolutely and centrally research by women by analysing old knowledge and as source of new knowledge’ (Stanley l997). Reinharz (l992) has an alternative view which states that ‘what feminist research is ... to illustrate feminist research as including, i.e. to collect, categorise and examine the multitude of feminist research voices’. While the debate is not conclusive, feminist philosopher Sandra Harding (l991:106) asked: ‘is there a distinctive feminist method of inquiry?’ In response, Naples (2003:24) highlights the ‘important connections between epistemology, methodologies and research methods’ in support of a feminist methodology. Cook and Fonow (l986:5) identify five basic epistemological principles that have been discussed by scholars who have analysed feminist methodology in the field of sociology. These include (i) the necessity of continuously and reflexively attending to the significance of gender and gender asymmetry as a basic feature of all social life, including the conduct of research; (2) the centrality of consciousness-raising as a specific methodological tool and as a general orientation or way of seeing; (3) the need to challenge the norm of objectivity that assumes that the subject and object of research can be separated from one another and that personal and/or grounded experiences are unscientific (4) concern for the ethical implications of feminist research and recognition of the exploitation of women as objects of knowledge; and (5) emphasis on the empowerment of women and

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transformation of patriarchal social institutions through research. This thesis adopts an empowerment and transformation methodology as expressed by Cook and Fonow (l986:6) because government policy promoting women in male-dominated industries is an attempt by policymakers to alter social stereotypes about women’s capacity to perform tasks considered exclusively male.

In addition, Miles and Huberman’s (l994) approach to qualitative research methods has been adopted here because it provides the understanding of how the concepts of race, class and gender intersect with the lived reality of the respondents as they engage with their daily activities. Therefore, the adoption of the theory of intersectionality will highlight the multiple complexities that promote an interdisciplinary approach to actual experiences enabling the researcher to perceive or regard social realities in a non-linear, contradictory and complex manner. Symington (2004) notes that using intersectionality requires that the researcher thinks differently about identity, equality and power. It requires that focus be placed on points of intersection, complexity, dynamic processes, and the structures that define access to rights and opportunities, rather than on defined categories or isolated issue areas. The adoption of mixed methods encourages the development of case studies which can be compared for similarities, differences and anomalies that the research process will reveal.

In developing the research methodology, three categories of identity namely race, class and gender are dissected in order to establish which category/ies of women experience these new opportunities as emancipatory. The intersectionality of race, class and gender is unpacked so as to challenge one-dimensional explanations of social experiences. The intersection of the three categories would reveal the ability of subjects (respondents who are African and Coloured) to utilise the new opportunities as equal citizenship as enshrined in the post-apartheid South African Constitution and Bill of Rights to construct or determine their own reality. Therefore, intersectionality is being used as a concept to unmask the different strands of social relations which intersect with actual experiences, discourse and political agency across individual and institutional levels33.

33 Therefore, intersectionality of race, class, and gender as categories of analysis locates Black women as doubly burdened, subject to the dominating practices of both a sexual and a racial and class hierarchy

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4.4 Methods

This section describes the mixed methods used to develop two case studies. These are semi-structured interviews with key informants and women respondents, which were selected through network sampling as well as observation of interactions among workers in their workplace.

4.4.1 Case Study Method

The case study method was chosen as the method to describe how women enter casualised employment or short-term contractual arrangements for women owned Small Micro Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) as a form of income generation. Because short-term employment is becoming the dominant form of employment in South Africa, the explanatory approach to case studies is considered the most appropriate method to capture the different experiences of women engaged in these two forms of employment contracts. As Baxter and Jack (2008:547) indicate, explanatory case studies elucidate the presumed causal links in real-life interventions that are too complex for the survey or experimental strategies. In the context of this study explanatory case studies also provide insights into women’s access to independent sources of income which enhances women’s decision-making power in all spheres of their lives. Yin (2009:18) notes that the case study method deals with the many variables of interest which relies on multiple sources of evidence. Yin goes further to state that these sources of evidence include the design, data collection techniques and specific approaches to data analysis. By explaining the different aspects of empowerment or emancipation or lack thereof, the two case studies of construction and fishing are compared and contrasted by drawing linkages on similarities and dissimilarities of women employed in each industry. In documenting the case study, the themes developed in the theoretical framework chapter (chapter 3) were formulated into questions that were the ones used in the interviews conducted.

(Crenshaw l991). Furthermore, the concept of intersectional analysis provides a framework for feminist writers to use the dominant discourses of resistance thus reclaiming ‘victims’ by recognising social agency in order to theorise the experiences of Black women as central to feminist theory.

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4.4.1.1 The Construction of the First Case Study

The first case study is located in the Maputo Development Corridor (the N4 Toll Road). The Maputo Development Corridor (the N4 Toll Road) is a labour-based 34 construction project supported by government initiatives which include technical training and skills enhancement for Black entrepreneurs, especially women-run businesses. Historically the construction sector is considered a capital-intensive industry dominated by men. The Maputo Development Initiative is a transport corridor – a single Toll Road – namely the N4 from the towns of Witbank to Maputo. The project’s value is in excess of US$ 180 million and is expected to create ‘at least 2,000 jobs’35. Construction companies owned by women were being highlighted as a major success of the social policy on Spatial Development Initiatives to promote women’s enterprise. The international company hired to refurbish the road had contractual obligations to sub-contract services to women-owned enterprises. Because the N4 Toll Road is considered the most advanced of the SDIs, there was much attention being paid to it being a transport corridor linking two countries. The South African government’s promotion of the N4 Toll road was to attract foreign direct investment to refurbish the Maputo dockyard in Mozambique and to build factories along the corridor in Mpumalanga Province in South Africa. A key factor why women are employed in this male-dominated industry is that it is policy driven. That means, the process is top-down and stacked against women. The fieldwork for the case study was conducted in l999/2000. Initially, the fieldwork consisted of one case study in the construction industry, but as I wrote up my findings, I realised that I would not be able to answer my research question with only one example. At the time, it seemed appropriate to compare or seek commonalities with women in similar positions, but in a different male-dominated industry.

34 The term labour-based technology is used to describe a technology that applies a labour/equipment mix that gives priority to labour, supplementing it with appropriate equipment where necessary for reasons of quality or cost. While producing or maintaining infrastructure to a specified standard in a cost-effective manner, people are employed under fair working conditions. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/ recon/eiip/about/lbt.htm. Accessed 12 December 2009

35 www.mcli.co.za/mcli-web/mdc/mdc.html. Accessed 25 June2010.

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4.4.1.2 The Construction of the Second Case Study

Consequently, I chose the West Coast Investment Initiative (WCII) as a site in order to explore and compare the position of women in male-dominated industries. According to Miles and Huberman (l994), the researcher is given freedom to compare any groups. Secondly, the choice was based on my familiarity with fishers because my father was a recreational fisher. He often told us about the recreational licensing system and how the local government authorities had become strict in granting these permits. I also chose the West Coast because of its close proximity to Cape Town and the fact that the community spoke English and Afrikaans – both languages spoken by me. According to Bek and Taylor (2001), the West Coast Investment Initiative is the second most popular Spatial Development Initiative earmarked for investment. The mini-mill of Saldanha Steel was identified as the anchor project for the West Coast Investment Initiative. Furthermore, the Saldanha Steel plant offers possibilities for linked and related industries. In addition, the under-exploited scope for development in agriculture, tourism and fishing in the region makes the location of an SDI attractive. The spatial area possesses a significant resource base, satisfactory infrastructure and a broader social and natural environment, which presents attractive opportunities to investors. It is important to note that, relatively speaking, the West Coast was not a neglected/poor region and possessed good infrastructure, especially roads, before the launch of the WCII (Bek and Taylor 2001:66).

The interviews for the fishing case study were conducted from 2002-2003. Thirdly, it was also an industry that had myths about women’s lack of strength and technical skills. Fourthly, it was also an industry that was subject to government post-apartheid policy regulation. For example, the construction industry has adopted labour-based methods in order to attract unskilled workers but also to target women as the preferred employees in construction projects. In the fish processing industry, seasonal licensing has become regulated because fishers are considered by government authorities as poachers destroying the maritime environment. Consequently, the quota is too small for fishers to rely on fishing as a means to earn an income. When applying for licenses, it is mandatory that women make up part of the team. This is similar to the construction industry that prefers women SMME owners to apply for contracts and it is mandatory to employ people who are considered as previously disadvantaged. Finally, in the industries the policy formulation and implementation is a top-down process where government policymakers do not consult or seek the opinions of the affected communities.

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By constructing two case studies, the research examines each setting and cross-setting. The case study method is useful because it addresses contemporary issues of affirmative action and the promotion of equality for women in the workplace which is dominated by males. Yin (2009:11) confirms this approach because case studies use direct observation of the events being studied and the interviews of the persons involved in the events. A supporting viewpoint is that of Jacklyn Cock’s (l980) case study which examines the intersection of race, gender and class through the specific relation of the White ‘madam’ and Black ‘maid’ in South Africa. Cock’s seminal text on domestic work attempts to examine the question of whether sisterhood is possible between women who have such diverse worldviews. Therefore, the usefulness of a case study is located in its capacity to explore the phenomena of women-owned enterprises and women working in casualised employment within the context of a democratising South Africa as part of the globalising world.

4.4.2 Interviews with Key Informants and Women Respondents

The main research technique used was in-depth semi-structured interviews. The interview was based on a semi-structured and open-ended questionnaire and was tape recorded with the permission of the interviewees. As Reinharz (1992:18) states, this method allows the researcher to explore people’s views of reality and allows the researcher to generate a theory due to the facts and open-ended research questions produce non-standardised information that encourages full use of differences among people by accessing respondents’ ideas, thoughts and memories in their own words. The choice of qualitative interviews encouraged participants, both key informants36 and respondents37, to describe the world in which they live – and how this world has been altered or whether it has remained the same since l994. Adopting Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledge’, the interviews were tape recorded and analysed with the understanding that the information being shared with me was ‘the truth’ because it was their reality at that particular time and space. It was clear from the outset that had I approached the topic directly I would have

36 Key informants were interviewed to provide background information on the topic, geographical area or how government social policy was being implemented in that particular industry,

37 Respondents were interviewed to elicit data on the topic and industry and women’s role in the industry. Respondents were interviewed either as individuals or in groups. A respondent is a person who provides data for analysis by responding to a survey questionnaire

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elicited normative responses regarding whether the post-apartheid period offered opportunities or limitations in the male-dominated context in which they are employed. Instead, I followed the advice of Kabeer (2000:407), by adopting a life history approach using a free conversational format while ensuring that the list of key issues and interview guidelines were covered in the conversation. A life history approach encourages interviewees to give an historical account of how they entered a particular form of employment.

I conducted individual and group interviews at different periods over five years which allowed me an opportunity to reflect on the research questions and the best approach to adopt with participants when interviewing or observing. The basis of the interview was the schedule of questions (Appendix A) related to women working in male-dominated employment. Between interview sessions, I was able to reflect on the interview data in order to search for solutions to pertinent questions that may not have a response. The group interviews supported, clarified or confirmed the data elicited from the individual in-depth interviews. It was during the collective interviews where I adopted the hermeneutical circle38 to encourage participants to engage with each other, or add to the knowledge base being developed through in-depth individual interviews. The probing of the questions to assess whether respondents experienced their employment or contractual work as empowering and/or emancipatory should encourage discussion of certain concepts and topics which will ultimately provide the research findings with a contextual meaning. Individual interviews elicited in-depth information to build the case study. The group interviews supported, clarified or confirmed the data elicited from the in-depth interviews.

All interviews were conducted in both English and Afrikaans and interviews lasted approximately one hour. The names of the interviewees have been changed in order to protect their identities. The initial interviewing period took 8 weeks during August/September 1999. During this period I spent 10 days near the construction site. The interviews were approximately 1 hour long. Some interviews took longer than one hour because respondents spoke of their many failed attempts at applying for tenders. Using a constructivist approach I refined the design of my questionnaire based on the analysis of the case study in construction, which included my field notes (Babbie & Mouton 2005:275).

38 Where the respondent understands individual parts of the text as a reference to the whole text

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The qualitative interviews with respondents were complemented and supported by interviews with representatives who provided insights into the manner in which national and local government decisions are implemented. A major limitation is that the sample is small and while rich in experiences of women in the construction industry, it did not provide the contrasts between women workers and women owners. This limitation was a result of the SMME owner being unwilling for me to interview the women workers. According to the SMME owner I had not negotiated access to women workers employed by the construction SMME.

I wrote up my findings which were rich in information on government policies on affirmative action, targeted procurement and labour-based employment. This information informed the reworking of my questionnaire. I interviewed the SMME owner who shared her experiences of establishing a construction SMME. I wrote up this interview which now gave me information on the training programmes she enrolled on in order to learn both the skills of management and techniques of labour-based construction. The second interview with the SMME owner was conducted at the Women-in-Construction conference. This interview yielded rich information on how the SMME owner mobilised women to join her construction organisation, the difficulties of accessing finance and the constraints she confronted when engaging with large construction companies. I requested that the SMME owner introduce me to women in similar work environments. She introduced me to the group of women in the allied industries of painting, bricklaying, and the rehabilitation of schools and roads. According to the SMME owner, these women were familiar with tasks related to the construction industry. I interviewed seven women in three different group interviews. The schedule of questions for the group interviews were refined to focus on how they accessed finance to run their companies, learnt skills linked to male-dominated industries and government policies on affirmative action

In the second case study, there were two groups of women. One group was women workers earning a wage and the other a group of SMME owners. I spent 14 days over a period of 6 months visiting the fishing site. The case study on the fishing industry provided a wider variety of opportunities for women to become economically independent as entrepreneurs, own account operators and workers. It also provided an opportunity for women to use their newly acquired skills to seek other employment opportunities. For the fish processing the interviews with the non-government organisation trainer and businesswoman complemented the qualitative interviews

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with respondents. Their opinions give insights into the training opportunities for women who were unable to access employment as fishers.

Selection process of network sampling and profile of the interviewees in both case studies

I used the concept of network sampling39 because there are a number of relationships these populations could share. In this case study it means that each respondent worked in the same industry or shared membership of the same women’s organisation and the respondents’ familiarity of the industry. Both case studies relied on key informant interviews to assist with the initial selection of interviewees. In the construction case study the research manager of the Development Bank of Southern Africa provided names of the owners of the construction SMME. After interviewing the research manager, I interviewed a researcher on Spatial Development Initiatives and the researcher and coordinator of the group, Women in Construction. These interviews form the basis of the informant interviews for the first case study.

The informant interviews for the fishing case study were conducted with a local government representative located in Cape Town, the training manager of the local fish processing factory in Saldanha Bay and the non-government representative to familiarise myself with the training being offered to seasonal workers.

39 Network sampling is sampling of rare populations. http://www.amstat.org/sections/srms/ proceedings/papers/ 1988_007.pdf

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Profile of the group interviewed in case one, the Construction Industry

I interviewed the following key informants and women’s respondents in the construction industry:

Key informants

Name of key informant Sex/Race Occupation Date of interview

G.H. Male, White Manager, policy research 3 August 1999

I.V Female, White Policymaker/coordinator of Women in Construction

3 August 1999

R.B Male, Black Researcher on spatial development initiatives 3 August l999 Individual interviews with Respondents who research SDIs

Name of interviewee Sex/Race Occupation Date of Interview

A Male/White Chief executive officer, community based organisation on SDIs

19 August l999

MM Female/White Researcher on SDIs for SADC Region 3 August l999

CD Male/White University lecturer 17 August l999

Z Male/White Policy Researcher Government department 17 August 1999 Interviews with Respondents

Name of interviewee Sex/Race Occupation Date of interview

FH Female/African Owner SCC: owner/operator 23 August 1999

D Male/African Coordinator/trainer SCC: skilled artisan 23 August 1999

X Male/White Construction Company, HR manager 19 August 1999 Group interviews

Name of interviewee Sex/Race Occupation Date of interview

IJ and KL, MN Female/African Housing construction Owner/operator

24 August 1999

CD and GH Female/African Rehabilitation of schools Owner/operator

24 August 1999

AB and EF Female/African Painters of schools/owner/operator 24 August 1999

BE/FA Males/African Government officials representing SMME desk in Mpumalanga Province

20 August 1999

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Profile of the group interviewed in the second case study, the fishing industry

I interviewed the following informants and respondents in the Fish Processing industry:

Key informants

Name Sex/Race Occupation Date of interview

IJ Male/Coloured Government representative – Western Cape Provincial office

23 April 2003

KL Female/Coloured Businesswoman in local area 25 April 2003

P Female/Coloured Organiser for local NGO 25 April 2003 Individual Interviews

Name Sex/Race Occupation Date of interview

FK Female/Coloured Chairperson Fishing Association 24 April 2003

AB Female/Coloured Organiser Local fishers organisation: worker 23April 2003

CD Female/Coloured Worker fishing company (wife of fisherman) /seasonal worker

24 April 2003

EF Female/Coloured Domestic worker trained in line fishing 23 April 2003

GH Female/Coloured Trainer NGO linked local development 24 April 2003

MN Male/Coloured Trainer, Human resource department, local fishing company

24 April 2003

NH Female/Coloured Local entrepreneur and trainer of women entrepreneurs

25 September 2003

J Male/White Owner of SMME/trainer of women machinists 27 September 2003 Group interviews

Name of interviewee Sex/Race Occupation Date of interview

OP, QR, ST,UV,WX Male/Coloured Fisher persons 25 April 2003

Il, VW, XO Female/Coloured Women workers sewing overalls for fisherman 27 September 2003

B and C Female/Coloured Young Engineering students Working on trawlers

28 September 2003

For the construction industry case study I interviewed 3 key informants, 11 respondent interviews of which 7 are individual and 4 group interviews. The women ranged between 30-60 years of age. Eight interviews were conducted with nine men. The interview with the two provincial government officials was a group interview. The women were between 40-60 years of age. The men were between 35-60 years of age. The biological ages of interviewees are imprecise because I thought it would provide more privacy and confidentiality.

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For the fishing industry case study I interviewed 3 key informants, 11 respondent interviews of which 8 individual and 3 group interviews. Two women were 19 years old and the other women ranged between the ages of 30-60 years. With the exception of the young engineering cadets, all the women had children and some were married.

A group interview was conducted with male fishers in the local association’s office. An in-depth interview was conducted with the HR manager of the local fish processing factory and the male trainer at the local NGO. The men were 40-60 years of age. As in the first case study, the biological ages of interviewees are imprecise because I thought it would provide more privacy and confidentiality.

In total I conducted interviews with 24 women (12 individual and 5 group interviews) and 20 males (13 individual interviews and 2 group interviews).

4.4.3 Observations and Field Notes

I spent time observing participants40 in order to make astute sociological observations of how participants experienced ongoing struggles or challenges to redefine and claim a legitimate femininity in light of government’s preferential treatment of women. At the Women in Construction Conference, I observed the manner in which women networked and shared information on access to contracts or the next training session. I listened to the female respondents actively engaging each other, talking animatedly about their experiences of tendering or seeking finance – all important aspects of their livelihoods in the construction industry. These conversations indicated the hope that contracts would alter their life situation from being an operator to one of ownership of a SMME. More importantly, there is the hope that the ability to access a long-term contract would create a sustainable SMME. On my trip to the construction site, I drove through some of the areas where the SMME did some work. At the site I was also able to observe women laying kerbstones.

40The method is based on the insight that one derives from a community's values, dynamics, internal relationships, structures and conflicts, best from their observed actions, rather than from their (normative) statements of what ‘is’. The participant observer attempts immersion, to the extent permitted, in local life in order to understand and document how things work. http://www.iisd.org/ casl/caslguide/ParticipantObserver.html. Accessed on 15 December 2008.

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In Paternoster, I passed children and women on their way to a local shop near the fish processing factory. They spoke of what they were going to purchase for dinner and school lunches41. In the interview situation, the respondents in the fish processing industry or allied industries spoke confidently of how they perceived affirmative action policies and how this process has affirmed them within their families. The conversations indicated the need for a better lifestyle through more sustained income from longer-term contracts either as seasonal workers or as SMME owners.

4.5 Analysis of Data

On completion of the interviews, the tape-recordings were transcribed and conceptual categories were developed according to the questions. I used a conceptually clustered matrix to generate meaning because I had a priori ideas about concepts that derived from the same theory or theme. Miles and Huberman (l994:127) note that clustering is to create conceptual coherence. I used selective coding to cluster responses. As I analysed the empirical data, the concepts evolved from the conceptual categories, for example, marginalisation, empowerment, emancipation, affirmative action, equality, social policy, etc. In developing the matrix it became obvious there were relationships between certain concepts. For example, what were the motives for accepting short-term contracts? Did women believe that short-term contracts would enhance their career prospects? How did the concept of affirmative action relate to the variables empowerment and emancipation? Did women believe that they would be able to alter the power relationship in the home if they were able to perform work considered the preserve of males?

These concepts42 form the structure of the sub-section in each of the chapters analysing the two case studies. The organisation of case study findings proved to be a challenge because of the huge amount of information. The case studies form the basis of Chapters 5 and 6. These chapters also included empirical data which did not match the responses of the original interviewee questionnaire. This data related to women’s expectations that the benefits of casualised employment for women workers or short-term contracts as SMME owners would

41 The languages of English and Afrikaans were spoken and I was able to follow the conversation. 42 According to Glaser and Strauss (l967:38), these concepts must be analytic (sufficiently generalised to

designate characteristics of concrete entities). They should also be sensitising to yield a meaningful picture that enables one to grasp the reference in terms of one’s own experiences.

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provide better life opportunities for their children. These views took me by surprise because I had assumed that casualised work had no benefits for the women employed in these lowly paid jobs. The second case study enabled me to rework some of the research questions in order to ensure relevance, integrate concepts of race, class and gender and to capture the data to support the theoretical assumptions as discussed in Chapter 7. The group interviews conducted with women allied to construction and the women entrepreneurs and seasonal packers in fish processing encouraged me to situate and categorise each respondent or group of respondents according to their many contrasts and commonalities and to assess the interaction between structure and agency as it intersected with the categories of race and gender. As Glaser and Strauss (l967:55) opine, comparison groups provide simultaneous maximisation or minimisation of both the differences and the similarities of data that bear on the categories being studied. This control allows for theoretical relevance of the data collection (ibid).

I used the interview material of the two respondents, the construction SMME owner and the female boat owner, in order to build a case study of women in the two industries. Therefore, the two in-depth interviews formed the basis for building a composite case study in each industry. While the data collated from the interviews was used to build the case studies, the exploratory nature of the research allowed for questions to be added when unanticipated information was offered – for example: the benefits for the children of women contract employees. In Chapters 5 and 6, the findings were analysed, matched and compared to the concepts of empowerment and emancipation to confirm the initial theoretical assumptions. Comparisons including similarities and dissimilarities are discussed in Chapter 7 to (i) create a theory on marginalisation of women and (ii) in order to further the debate.

4.6 Defining the Case Studies

In summary the sequence of research followed in both sites was the following:

A literature review of the construction and fishing industries located in the Development Corridors namely: the Maputo Development Corridor and West Coast Investment Initiative were conducted. Secondary information on women’s roles in these two industries provided valuable information regarding how government policies are being implemented.

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Notes on the proceedings of the keynote address by Stella Sicqua, the Honourable Minister of Public Enterprises, in August l999, were taken as evidence when I attended the Women in Construction Conference (August l999).

An interview was conducted with a male provincial government representative to explore the different aspects of government plans to provide employment via infrastructure projects on the West Coast where the case study on fishing is located.

A review of the literature on both case studies to substantiate or compare with the initial findings.

Research findings were analysed and form the basis of Chapter 5 and 6.

Researching case study one: The construction industry

Interviews were conducted with three key informants43 ; two male researchers: the head of research and the researcher on SDIs and a woman researcher on women-in-construction. In-depth interviews were conducted with the policy researcher in the Mpumalanga provincial government department, CEO of NGO for SDIs, two Mpumalanga provincial government representatives, a female policy researcher on SDIs in SADC region and a university lecturer. The women owner and the male coordinator of the SMME were interviewed.

Researching case study two: The fishing industry

Informant interviews were conducted with two women – one a businesswoman and the other a NGO trainer and a male government representative in the provincial office.

In-depth interviews were conducted with eleven women: the female president of the local fishers’ organisation and a female entrepreneur, a female seasonal worker (wife of a male fisher), three female workers at the sewing NGO, a female domestic worker trained as a fisher and two female engineering cadets and female worker in the local fish market and the female organiser of the local fishers association.

43 Someone well versed in the social phenomenon that you wish to study and who is willing to tell you what he or she knows (Babbie & Mouton 2005:643).

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4.7 Reflective Practice: Praxis and Research Ethics

4.7.1 Research Ethics

I went to great lengths to explain the purpose of my research to interviewees who recognised me as a university graduate and thought I could influence the policy-making process. Ryen, in Exporting ethics (2007:211) reminds researchers that research guidelines explain how to respect and cooperate locally in cultures that are not our own, but she reminds researchers that this is still only evident at a macro level. Interaction takes place at micro level which is personal, intricate and loaded with meaning. Ryen (2007) goes further to ask how a researcher can conclude based on categories loaded with cultural meaning what is ethical research in cultures other than our own. According to Ryen (2007), if the researcher keeps to the interview questions, the discussants are able to make their own decisions regarding how to respond to the questions. These responses will invariably be made within some kind of framework which is the ‘guideline’.

During the fieldwork process I was highly conflicted regarding what to do with the information. In research methods courses, one is instructed to establish rapport through empathy and trust. I succeeded at achieving rapport but was faced with another dilemma. Rapport in the field makes communications resemble friendship which the respondent regards as friendship where trust has been established. To avoid the violation of privacy or finding oneself embroiled in a conflict of interest, Stake and Jegatheesan (2006) recommend that researchers accept data close to the topic. This will ensure rapport but hopefully avoid violating the respondent’s privacy. To promote women entrepreneurship, I used the data on the construction case study to write a short article on FH’s role in the construction industry. This article was published in a local feminist journal. A second article on women SMME owners was published in the South African magazine called ‘Growth’.

4.7.2 Reflective Practice

As the ‘researcher’ I had changed my class position through my educational opportunities, but remained committed to document the lives of ‘a subaltern group’ because as a feminist activist I felt responsible to be part of the process towards creating meaning of the new democratic dispensation for both the respondents and myself. This task, according to Naples, can be

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facilitated by feminist researchers who are informed by standpoint theoretical frameworks employing reflective practice to counter the reproduction of inequalities in ethnographic investigation. Weeks (l998:92) opines that standpoint epistemologies as articulated by Dorothy Smith, stress that our social relations – our gender or class relations – are not constructed by outside forces but rather are constituted in and through our everyday practices. Standpoint epistemologies offer ‘a more dialectical’ conception of the relationship between system and subject, one in which we are not just passive products of social forces but also active participants (Naples 2003:38). Recognising that fieldwork reproduces inequalities and processes of domination, Naples suggests that a number of reflective strategies be adopted. It is this dialectical approach or reflective strategies that I adopt to explore the question regarding women’s equality in male-dominated work based on the lived realities as narratives of the cohort of women interviewed in the construction and fish-processing industries.

4.7.3 Reflecting on the Intersection of Race, Gender and Class

As I collated my data I went through a number of learning processes. I was reminded of how Reinharz (1992) comments about the versatility of interviewing and compatibility with feminist concerns being reflected in my research. From a gender perspective, the social science concepts were being modified by the new ways of seeing the world through the eyes of the respondents. For example, the concept of empowerment is a very jaded word often used in the most inappropriate ways. In the two case studies, I could share the experiences of women learning new skills. When interviewing the women, they shared the feelings of empowerment of being able to do new and different work tasks and testing them as part of a work contract. Thus, the concept of empowerment had taken on a particular meaning that created a sense of improvement that could change the incumbent’s life for the better. At night, I would read my field notes in order to reflect on some of the responses to my questions because the women and men interviewed had many roles and I had to reconcile these with my research question, their aspirations and the reality of how they earned their incomes.

At night I listened to a selection of interviews or re-read the transcribed interviews several times to go beyond what I was being told in the interview. In accordance with Naples’ (2003:l99) advice, I tried to remain reflective of my own assumptions and interactions as an individual analyst of social life, disciplinary practitioner and social activist. The interviews evoked many conflicted

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emotions. Sometimes I would feel enraged when I listened to women relate their experiences of entering the male domain of work. The male workers were very condescending and patronising. For example, the African male trainer in the construction industry spoke of the women he trained as if they were ‘his girls’. He did not perceive them as independent workers who would eventually outgrow his ‘patriarchal protection’ and become fully fledged SMME owners and skilled construction workers. The intersection of gender was reflected in his approach to women entering the male domain of construction which was very different from the male researchers (White and African) who considered this a major breakthrough for the implementation of employment equity. The male fishers were equally patriarchal. They spoke of the myths related to women’s presence on the boat as an omen of bad luck.

The African woman SMME construction owner appeared enthusiastic about her work. I felt a keen sense of solidarity with her because as a Black woman she appeared to have taken up the cudgels to challenge men on their own turf. As a Coloured woman, I enthusiastically embraced her experience and shared knowledge of building women’s networks to encourage her to strengthen her team. The exchange of views on how to strengthen women’s organisations transcended education or class because many of the opinions exchanged were universal tactics on building a representative women’s movement. More importantly, the differences between us based on ethnicity, class (based on my educational achievements) or my urban centeredness became points for discussion rather than creating divisions. Therefore, the intersection of ethnicity and gender took on many dimensions in our interactions which sometimes revealed similar aspirations while also displaying differences based on access to opportunities.

When writing up fieldwork notes in the evenings, I would find myself conflicted by the contradictions of the reality of the casualised labour market versus the participants’ belief that opportunities provided by government legislation in fact would improve their lives towards substantive equality. As a Coloured woman I identified with their feelings of marginalisation from the mainstream of the workforce. The women SMME owners (African and Coloured) expressed frustration at not being able to access finance or competing with White multinational companies. The institutional patriarchy continued to see Coloured and African women as risks because they did not fit the profile of a lender with collateral or assets. Intersectionality of ethnicity with gender conjured up many different permutations for women trying to challenge financial institutions. Being able to discuss issues in English or Afrikaans built a sense of solidarity with the women

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whom I interviewed. Consequently, a common language fused with the common endeavour to rework boundaries of feminism in sharing my knowledge of legislation with their experiences of interpreting the same through their lived experiences. While the women interviewed did not create a homogenous group, they had similar aspirations for improving their skill level and this they perceived as entitling them to better paid jobs.

As I have already stated, the study is a culmination of years of dedicated work on gender-related issues. There was a further learning process when I worked on my data at home. The distance from the research site encouraged me to be more analytical of interview material which allowed me to create parameters for interpretation that interviewees could not control. The intersection of my multiple identities of observer, participant, intimate confidant and analyst did not necessarily prove to be problematic when I consolidated my findings in order to substantiate or disprove my different theoretical assumptions. For example, the commonplace notion that employers seek trainable, malleable, undemanding workers, especially women, because capital makes rather than finds workers was found to be too much of a generalisation. This viewpoint did not acknowledge that not all workers are pliable but that certain women and men have the agency to change their lives. This has implications for the research process and gives us new tools for thinking about how human beings challenge the terms under which global production takes place. It indicates that the women interviewed made active choices to work informalising industries.

I was conscious of the multiple hierarchies and power relations between myself, the interviewee and the employers/managers whom I interviewed. The power relationship inherent to my need to gather empirical data as opposed to the interviewees’ expectations and the reality of what lurked behind the questions remained constantly fore-grounded in my mind. I was very conscious that my own working class roots motivated my need to collect the life histories of women who were similar to those in my own extended family. While most of the interviews were conducted in the English language, the language differences did not create an imbalance between the interviewer and interviewee. For example, I was aware of the over-eagerness of participants to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear in the hope that I could make recommendations to policy-makers influencing the fishing sector or to gain favour with the construction company who awarded road construction contracts. While the ability to improve their life opportunities through social policies does exist, I was acutely aware of the complexities confronting interviewees whose daily productive and reproductive lives were fraught with challenges pertaining to how to cut through

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the bureaucratic red tape in order to benefit from affirmative action processes. Thus, the intersectionality of power, ethnicity and class had to be constantly reflected upon in order not to create false hope on the part of the interviewees.

At the fish market I watched the woman worker cleaning fish for sale to local residents. Her task was to sell the fish on behalf of the local fishers. Her task to promote the fish market infrastructure as a site for local residents to purchase seafood – beneficiated as a consumable for dinner – was ambitious. Local residents did not necessarily have the finances to purchase their dinner after selling the fish caught for the day. In my field notes, I commented on the women in the construction industry who welcomed skills training which taught labour-based techniques. Many of these techniques were similar to the skills they had learnt building their homes in the Bantustans. These are skills learnt as a child kneading the mud into bricks for the huts. Women welcomed the newly acquired skill as creating a more employable worker, yet none of them related the intersection of this skill with male organisational power to determine who is included or excluded from their industry.

For the women concerned, the skills training brought an opportunity to enter a better paying job but in reality the job may not materialise, for example, in the case of the domestic worker who had trained as a fisher. While I conducted interviews, I constantly reminded myself of the radical feminist adage that the ‘personal is political’ because I often encountered opposition from male interviewees who informed me that women have been liberated since l994 (democratic elections) and that there is consequently ‘no need to ask about gender issues or women’s oppression’ (telephonic interview with Manager of Fishing Company based in Saldanha Bay, April 2003). Sometimes, I felt like something of a ‘troublemaker’ who failed to understand male views of ‘women’s emancipation’. I was acutely aware that the concept of intersectionality was being used to value a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the research. As I gathered information I was conscious to build a picture ‘from the ground upwards’ to account for the various influences that shape the lives of respondents. In other words, by using a life history approach I established a baseline of information about respondents and could build the case study based on the interview questions. As I asked questions of how women make a living and making notes of their experiences, I also made field notes of how I would go back to ask the same question so I could document the different experiences, both productive and reproductive, had impacted on their lives. The

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questions were asked to unpack how the post-apartheid social policies influenced women’s lives and how men felt about policies promoting women’s rights.

Men spoke openly of how emasculated they felt because government policies of affirmative action promoted women. The men failed to recognise the inherent power they held because of their accumulated skill in the industry. Most important was the ability to observe participants which allowed me to distinguish between what I was being told in the interviews as opposed to that which was contrasted by glimpses of the lived reality of working women struggling to redefine their roles in a period of high levels of unemployment and limited employment. For example, a male fisher spoke passionately about his spouse’s right to equality, yet he did not seek additional forms of income once he had exceeded his fishing quota. He spent time between contracts as a volunteer at a local non-government organisation. Consequently, she was the regular income earner and her wage had to cater for all the family needs until his next contract.

A reflective approach implies the development of a more egalitarian and participatory field method than traditionally utilised in scientific investigation. Moreover, dialogue can easily elude questions of power as noted by Naples (2003:201). Therefore, being conscious of my multiple identities assisted me with the interpretation of my notes in the capacity of an observer. This encouraged me to locate myself within the role of owner/operator which is how the SMME owner operated. By learning to observe others, I could also take note of my own actions and reactions as I learnt the contours and dynamics of engaging in this research process.

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CHAPTER 5: WOMEN WORKING IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

Nimble fingers revisited: feminists who see patriarchy and gender subordination as critical underpinnings and inevitable consequences of all capitalism refuse to recognise any benefits for women in the Third World from employment in export factories, insisting that such employment intensifies rather than alleviates their gender subordination. The works of Elson and Pearson are popular with this group.

(Lim l990)

5.1 Introduction

This chapter analyses the research findings in order to demonstrate the methodology as developed in Chapter 4. As stated in Chapter 4, Miles and Huberman’s (l994) qualitative research method was utilised and this involves a process of collecting and analysing data using codes, concepts and categories.44 The categories of analysis evolved from the conceptual categories, for example, marginalisation, empowerment, emancipation, affirmative action, equality, social policy, etc. These categories form the structure of sub-sections in each of the chapters analysing the two case studies. Using the categories as themes to demonstrate both the advantages and disadvantages of casual, flexible and temporary contracts for women and the manner in which these manifest themselves in terms of race, class and gender, each sub-section discusses that interview data in relation to each theme. This process is taken a step further to analyse the data in relation to the theory of intersectionality where the concepts of equality and emancipation are unpacked in order to demonstrate the working life of each respondent.

This chapter documents the research findings on women-owned (SMMEs)45 in the construction industry. The Black women interviewed were asked whether they were of the opinion that their

44 There are two important activities in qualitative data analysis, coding and category. Coding involves use of concepts, labels attached to happenings, events. Category, on the other hand, is a more abstract notion under which concepts are grouped together. Qualitative data analysis starts by coding each incident in the data into as many categories as possible. Categories emerge as data emerges. Open Coding means breaking data down into categories and subcategories. It involves expressing researchers’ observation using sentence/s, paragraph/sand giving each idea or event a name representing a phenomenon.

45 Owner operators of informal enterprises who hire others are a more entrepreneurial class of employers who invest their own capital in running informal enterprises and who hire others and may not, therefore, contribute their own labour.

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ownership and management of small enterprises promote their perception of emancipation as an indicator towards equality within their workplace and home. The primary research was conducted with the SME Construction Company (SCC) based in an African township outside Pretoria in the Gauteng Province. These findings are buttressed by views expressed by Black women owners and own-account operators46 in the allied industries of painting, the building of houses and the rehabilitation of roads, and schools and representatives of local government or private companies. Therefore, the chapter begins by describing the SME Construction Company case study; it then proceeds to discuss the research findings followed by an analysis based on secondary literature or government social policies.

Figure 2: Case Study of SME Construction Company, a Women-Owned SMME Construction Company

FH started a section of the Master Builders’ Association in Soshanguve and in l997; the name was changed to Soshanguve Bakgoni Women’s Group and was registered as an association. We (the women members of the SCC) joined the ‘Women in Construction Association’, (then a non-government organisation) which organised women in the industry47. Promoting women’s right to equality in the workplace is the focus of preferential treatment by the South African government’s policies on skills development and entrepreneurship. Women, as part of the historically disadvantaged communities, are targeted for preferential treatment in the guidelines for Development Corridors, especially the flagship of the Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) process, the N4 Highway48.

The SCC is one of three women-run enterprises that have been awarded tenders in the construction industry. FH49, the president of the SCC and a skilled construction worker, is amongst the women and men who have access to information on sub-contracts with TRAC, the main construction company building the N4 Toll-Road. TRAC is a subsidiary of Stocks & Stocks, Basil Read and Bouygues50 (SBB), the major road construction contractor51. The

46 Own-account workers: owner operators of single-units or family businesses or farms who do not hire others and who contribute their own capital and labour to the enterprise (Chen 2006).

47 SCC joined the Women in Construction as part of the interest group. The Women in Construction was launched at the University of Pretoria in collaboration with the University of Pretoria Gender Resource Centre.

48 The N4 Toll Road stretches from Witbank to Maputo in Mozambique and is part of the primary infrastructure of the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC), and is the most advanced international Development Corridor in Africa.

49 FH is a middle aged African woman one of three women who own the (SCC). 50 At the time of conducting the interview, SBB held a 25% interest of the company owned by French

Company Bouygues. Stocks and Stocks and Basil Read are South African companies. http://vhost.mbendi.co.za/orgs/cadi.htm. Accessed on 16 Dec. 2008. http://secure.financialmail.co.za/ report/france/france26-27.pdf Accessed: 16 December 2008.

51 ILO, no date, cited in Rogerson et al (l999) explains that labour-based road construction or employment intensive approaches stress that optimal use is made of labour as the predominant resource, while cost effectiveness and quality aspects are ensured.

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parent company awarded tenders to the SCC to the value of R400 00052. This tender is to place the cats’ eyes, kerbstones and prime coats on the roads. FH, as a successful recipient of a sub-contract would become the employer of women from the local geographical area who fall within the third tier of informal work. For the duration of the contract, FH would be the employer of mainly unskilled, contract women workers.

The SCC, like most construction companies engages in labour-intensive activity. This is because construction is considered an industry providing extensive employment with little investment. According to the ILO Report (2001:58) construction is an ‘employment spinner’ which can absorb the excluded who are least educated from the most disadvantaged sections of society. The industry has a poor image in the eyes of workers or potential workers because construction has led the way in the adoption of ‘flexible’ labour practices. Evidence from developing country contexts indicate the practice of recruiting labour through sub-contractors and intermediaries who are employed on temporary or casual terms as being the most dominant form of employment (ILO Report 2001).

5.2 Findings and Analysis of Research

A number of themes and sub-themes were developed in the process of implementing the different aspects of the qualitative research methods. The different themes are intersected with the concepts of emancipation and equality in order to assess whether these processes have benefited the Black women interviewed. Therefore, each section describes the different policies related to that particular theme, the data from the interviews are arranged by themes presented, followed by an analysis of the data supported by secondary literature.

The themes being discussed are:

Social policies promoting women and previously disadvantaged persons in labour-intensive work in the construction industry.

Social policies promoting government procurement policies.

Women’s empowerment through skills transfer and job creation.

Women owned-SMMEs’ ability to compete with large construction companies.

52 This is roughly equal to Euro 40 000.

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Power relations between men and women workers in the construction workplace.

The evidence of joint decision-making processes in the home.

Why women accept poorly paid jobs.

5.3 Social Policies Promoting Women and PDIs in Labour-Intensive Work

According to Auer et al. (2008) and Betcherman et al. (2004:ii) active labour market policies may be linked to intensive public works programmes and/or the development of small medium enterprises, a point that was discussed in Chapter 2. Minister Sicgua (l999) supports this viewpoint by stating that the Public Works Affirmative Action Programme (PWAAP) provides opportunities for women to gain access to job creation and poverty alleviation. According to the PWAAP, women’s engagement in public works programmes is a vehicle with which to challenge stereotypes of men as construction workers and it provides an opportunity for women to engage in building sustainable community assets such as roads that link schools to clinics. In support of this viewpoint, Rogerson (l999) notes that the construction industry in South Africa’s use of labour-based construction demonstrates an attempt to shift the job boundaries based on gender by encouraging women entrepreneurs to seek contracts in road construction.

Women were therefore encouraged to participate in the N4 Maputo Development Corridor as owners of construction enterprises or women workers. On examination, the N4 Maputo Development Corridor Social Contract is structured on three pillars namely; community participation; education and training development, and Small, Medium and Micro Enterprise (SMME) development. These pillars collectively underpinned the arrangements for engaging and building the entrepreneurial capacity of construction SMMEs (DBSA l997)). Amongst other reasons, this is to encourage women to participate, as both employees and employers, in the construction sector in particular and the economy in general.

Government legislation on positive action is part of the democratisation process to increase women’s visibility in the workplace because of the apartheid legacy where Black women and men, especially African women were forbidden from exerting their human capabilities. Consequently, the intention of empowerment legislation is to transform unjust social structures and institutions (Desai 2010).

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5.3.1 Research Findings

The creation of gender equality in the construction industry was confirmed by GH, a specialist in small contractor development at the Development Bank of Southern Africa who observed:

‘If men, who are the skilled artisans, act as catalysts by empowering women through the transfer of technical skills, the job boundaries based on gender will become increasingly blurred.’

(Interview, GH, male, manager, August l999)

In the focus group interview, women entrepreneurs who were contracted to rehabilitate schools have supported this view of skills transfer when they expressed views that:

‘Women workers employed on these job contracts also learn to perform new tasks through learning by doing. The focus group with women entrepreneurs revealed that ‘short courses teach women to lay bricks, mix cement and apply plaster on walls’.

(Interview, female Focus Group SMME owners, August l999)53

In her interview, FH, the owner of the SCC considers these labour-intensive, albeit unskilled tasks as a stepping stone to learning further skills in construction. However, she informed me ‘that her

enthusiasm did not go unchallenged because some women continue to refuse to perform labour-

intensive jobs they consider a male domain’. (Interview FH, female owner, SCC, August l999).

During the interviews, the women shared experiences regarding how they ‘move heavy objects

by creating pulleys’ (Interview, female Focus Groups SMME owners, August l999). Another example from my field notes is the women who worked as flag wavers directing the traffic or as cleaners of the roads near the construction site on the N4 Toll-Road (Field notes l999). These are tasks formerly performed by male employees of the local municipality. Because the construction industry is skills-driven, various tasks including scaffolding, brick laying, plastering, welding, slinging, carpentry, and over-head crane operation are performed by men. In the industry, women often work as occupational health and safety officers or cleaners (Kimani et al. 2008).

53 This group of women were interviewed at the Women in Construction Conference, August 1999

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5.3.2 Analysis of Findings

From the interviews, the following points are highlighted. The increasing number of Black women employed feminise this industry because they are confined to the lower echelons of the job market which requires little skill and knowledge of construction. While labour-based construction is labour-intensive there is also the assumption that Black women are suited to work on repetitive lowly-skilled tasks. Social policies consider lowly-skilled jobs as opportunities for Black women to earn an income; and for women enterprise owners to employ women from the local community where the project is located (Mitchell l998). In the construction industry in South Asia women perform unskilled tasks for low pay. In India it is estimated that up to 30% of the construction workforce are women. They are integrated into the building workforce at the bottom end of the industry, as unskilled workers or head-load carriers (ILO Report 2001:13). A contrasting viewpoint is that of Swedish and Danish construction workers, who are well paid, well protected and consider the work rewarding (ILO Report 2001:14).

The South African Commission on Gender Equality Report (l999) notes that women have been encouraged to tender for contracts to build sections of the Toll-Road or offer services such as catering or the supply of overalls. These are Black, working class women who aspire to own an SMME by accessing loans from banks to fund the contracts awarded by government tenders. Indeed, this approach to road construction has the capacity for restructuring the sexual division of labour in an industry that has been male-dominated by offering women-owned construction companies and workers a space to build and develop a career.

5.4 Social Policies Promoting Government Procurement Policies

According to Rogerson (l999), South Africa is emerging as one of the most innovative examples of applying a targeted procurement approach to stimulate the SMMEs in the road construction sector. It is especially aimed at encouraging women to participate both as employees and employers in this sector. Since l994, legislation on small business development has been shaped to meet the needs of women entrepreneurs. The Ten Point Programme procurement process

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awards points to women owned businesses and previously disadvantaged persons, disabled persons, employment and skills training for local inhabitants54.

The Ten Point Programme with regard to the empowerment of women has been adopted by the Mpumalanga Provincial government. Arkwright et al. (l998) notes that Mpumalanga is a rural province and the site of one of the broad approaches of the Provincial Small Business Desk which have been highlighted to target women as owners of small businesses especially in the field of tourism. The Maputo Development Corridor (MDC) is a prime project demonstrating the capacity to facilitate government endeavours to empower women in small businesses.

5.4.1 Research Findings

Research data revealed that the government representatives ‘felt that women should be confined

to employment that enhanced their femininity’ (Interview, BE and FA, government representatives, August l999). During the interview, the government officials remarked ‘that

women were learning skills of sewing and dressmaking’.

As one official remarked:

‘Women are coming up very nicely with traditional practices like dressmaking, but they fail when they need to market their goods. To create sustainable programmes it is necessary to create markets and distribution systems.’

(Interview, BE, male, government representative, August, l999)

Findings identify obstacles for women trying to set up SMMEs. In an interview with two government representatives, I was informed that the l997 White Paper on Small Business Development in South Africa identified two broad blockages; namely:

(i) Access to finance and how to address equity for all entrepreneurs; and

(ii) The management of business (Interview, BE and FA, male government representatives, August 1999).

54 This programme has been reviewed and is now called the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act no. 5, 2000.

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According to government representatives who promote the Mpumalanga Provincial Small Business Desk to women entrepreneurs, these blockages are obstacles to facilitating the building of a sustainable small business enterprise. Findings revealed that programmes are advertised through electronic media – radio, newspapers or community forums. Information on programmes is also disseminated through the community forums, non-government organisations and more recently women’s traditional societies (Field notes l999). As BE stated:

‘The idea of using women’s societies to invest their savings from Stokvels55 in projects that become small business enterprises is to guide women to realise that they can use their savings to create business opportunities for themselves’.

(Interview, BE, male, government representative, August l999)

The representatives were ambiguous about promoting women in male-dominated jobs. The interview data revealed men’s fear for women’s safety. In the interview, FA indicated that:

‘In our rural context I have reservations about women in construction. You cannot expect people to endanger their lives by asking them to climb up scaffolding to terrible heights. While we involve women, we must not enslave them by making them do terrible jobs. You can see women pushing the wheelbarrows, clearing the roads, throwing the bricks and managing the work teams. SMME construction owners must adhere to labour regulations.’

(Interview, FA, male, government representative, August l999)

The data indicates that women are reluctant to make a choice between being an employer or employee. Women face further difficulty in deciding whether they wish to partner with male owners of existing construction companies or starting out on their own.

The government representative continued the interview by asking

‘… whether women want to become sole contractors managing their own businesses or whether they want to work hand in hand with men who are familiar with construction skills, have accumulated experience in the industry and have developed a quality product. FA, a male government representative remarked that construction is a complex industry.’

(Interview, FA, male, government representative, August l999)

55 Stokvels are savings clubs set up by women.

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In the interview, the two government representatives noted ‘that currently construction appears as though it is a product of low technology, but in fact, it addresses high technology of tendering, pricing and managing the business. The tendering process awards preferential points for women owners’. Moreover, female government representatives sit on the tender board, which adjudicates the submissions. As BE remarked:

‘Many women become confused because government opportunities provide them with the option to become either an employer or an employee of newly formed female-headed businesses. These opportunities create new roles and it will take time for women to adjust.’

(Interview BE, male, government representative, August l999)

The research findings show that the two government representatives are sceptical of the procurement process, which they believe is open to corrupt practices. In the interview the government representative remarked that they are aware:

‘That women are invited to front for male-owned companies in order to perform what is called ‘rent a woman to visit the site and be paid R100 or R156 per meeting.’

(Interview, FA, male, government representative, August l999)

This manipulation of government’s policies promoting women’s roles in male-dominated industries is further compounded by encouraging ‘previously disadvantaged individuals’ 57 to participate in the tendering process58. However, as the government researcher remarked:

‘These are both men and women who fall into this category. In addition, this category includes businessmen and women who are not necessarily disadvantaged because they have accumulated assets and are able to access the tendering process. The category of ‘disadvantaged’ also includes white women who may not have an asset base but were not disadvantaged under apartheid.’

(Interview, government researcher, male, August l999)

56 Equivalent to approximately €100 57 The Ten Point Programme procurement process awards points to women owned businesses and

previously disadvantaged persons, disabled persons, employment and skills training for local inhabitants. Now called the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act no. 5, 2000

58 Previously disadvantaged individuals are men and women who were classified as non-White under the apartheid classification system.

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‘Fronting’ or ‘renting a woman’ is a practice where the company hires the services of a woman as a token to fulfil the preferential tendering requirements. The woman member does not participate in the decision-making of the company nor does she engage in the management of the contract. She is a token member who is hired to visit the construction site or when industry or government representatives evaluate the offices or building site.

5.4.2 Analysis of Findings

Interview data indicates that this paternalistic attitude prevailed throughout the interview and appeared to contradict the mandate of government representatives tasked with promoting women in work considered male-dominated. The opinions of the government representatives reinforced patriarchal values and beliefs of men as the household head and breadwinner of the family. Lemmer (l989) and Bozzoli (l981) argue that women who contradict these beliefs are considered not only to be disputing that men are entitled to privilege but also destroying African tradition. Therefore, depending on how legislation is interpreted, the intersection of policy and implementation could disadvantage the recipients of affirmative action policies.

5.5 Women’s Empowerment through Skills Transfer and Job Creation

The battery of post-apartheid legislation including the South African Constitution and Bills of Rights (l996), the Equal Opportunity Act and Skills Training Act promote gender equality and the eradication of all forms of racial discrimination. Therefore, small enterprises are eligible for work contracts based on meeting the preferential procurement policies of large construction companies. One of the requirements is the ability to manage a construction company. To meet these requirements, women enrol on skills training programmes which are offered by local non-government organisations or the provincial Department of Labour. The literature review on Spatial Development Initiatives noted that the N4 Concessionaire (TRAC) had built three community centres along the length of the road that were extensively used for skills training (DBSA 2005/06). These centres, together with mobile community forums, provided local entrepreneurs with the opportunity to become aware of the job opportunities and engage the concessionaire, who also made use of the opportunity to identify SMMEs and target those suited for pre-tender training (ibid).

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5.5.1 Research Findings

All the Black women interviewed spoke of the opportunity of being empowered through the government preferential tendering programme. The research findings indicate that empowerment takes place at different levels. The first level is skills training linked to the construction industry for the SCC group.

As FH stated:

‘An important aspect of developing the organisation was to attend workshops where I learnt the skills of construction.’

(Interview, FH, female owner, SCC August l999)

According to FH, the owner of SCC:

‘The work-team consisting of six persons, three men and three women ensure that the contract will be fulfilled. The rationale for employing the men is that they have the technical skills that women have not yet acquired and these skills will be transferred to the women over a period of time. The men have relatively extensive experience in the field of road construction.’

(Interview, FH, female owner, SCC, August l999)

As noted in the interview with FH, an important aspect of developing the construction SMME as a women-owned company has been the need for the members to learn the skills of road construction. In the interview FH of the SCC related ‘how members attended short courses at local universities in order to acquire both the technical and management skills’ (Interview, FH, Female owner of SCC, August 1999). Therefore, the second level is learning skills of managing

the SCC and engaging in the preferential tendering process. The SCC initially struggled to acquire contracts because there was no one with the necessary skills to complete the tender documents.

As FH states:

‘We submitted about 100 tender proposals but we were unsuccessful because we didn’t understand the tendering procedure. The language of tender documents is mystifying and the tendering process is complex making it difficult for the majority of women-owned businesses to participate on a competitive basis with their male counterparts. However, with time, the managers of the SCC

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acquired the knowledge and this has opened our eyes. We now know how to draw up a pricing schedule and how to tender.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC, August 1999)

Therefore, the SCC team also participated in short courses in procurement, financial and human resource management. By learning these skills, according to FH, members slowly acquired the necessary knowledge and skills with which to engage in the entire process from tendering through to the implementation of the contract. The data indicated that women lack confidence and their fears reinforce gender stereotypes. FH encouraged them, by saying:

‘Let’s come together and let us start learning technical skills. After attending training programmes on aspects of civil engineering and the tendering process, the SCC women became more confident.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC, August l999)

The findings reveal a third level of empowerment which is linked to community empowerment through skills transfer and job creation. For the SCC, managing and transferring skills to a workforce of 60 workers employed on short-term contracts is an empowering experience because they imparted skills to members of the community. According to FH, the women are from the local community and because they were employed by SCC were able to make a contribution towards building the N4 Toll road.

As FH proudly stated,

‘If you drive through the Ndwane or Montrose areas you will see the sections of the road we painted and the road caps or cats eyes that we placed there.’

(Interview FH, female owner of SCC, August l999)

When submitting the tender documents for the MDC contract, FH had to guarantee that the SCC would meet government criteria which included the transfer of skills to unemployed persons living in the local communities located geographically close to the N4 Toll-Road. As the owner of SCC she is aware that the employees of the local communities have temporary employment contracts for the duration of the supplier contract (ibid). She emphasised this because as the sub-contractor must adhere to the strict criteria of the supplier contract.

She explained that some of the criteria include:

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‘The employment of local inhabitants who are trained to perform the many tasks linked to the supplier contract.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC, August l999)

5.5.2 Analysis of Findings

These skills and job creation programmes are offered in the post-apartheid period because the history of the migrant labour system in South Africa confined Black women and their children to the family homestead in the Bantustans while fathers, husbands and spouses lived in urban areas in single hostels working as miners. Therefore, women built the family homes with the assistance of other women and children. This viewpoint is confirmed by Minister Sicgua, who at the second conference on Women in Construction noted:

‘The industry is a strange entry point because women have been unrecognised in the construction industry. Women traditionally made mud bricks for the houses in rural areas.’

(Notes from WIC Conference proceedings, 23 August l999)

Minister Sicgua stated further:

‘Women would walk and knead the mud to build bricks for the house but big companies do not want to give them an opportunity. Children would join their mothers in kneading the mud, learning from an early age how to make mud bricks and construct walls of the hut. She went on further to state that ‘emerging female contractors should defy traditions that exclude women from construction because it is considered a male domain.’

(Notes from WIC Conference proceedings, 23 August 1999)

Therefore the patriarchal attitude that women need to learn the skills of construction like brick-making and building should be challenged in order that the unrecognised skills many women acquired as part of family activities are enhanced in the school curriculum or adult education programmes. Post-apartheid affirmative action policies encourage women to enter the male-dominated jobs of engineering and allied industries and FH, the owner of SCC, has taken advantage of government policies by establishing a construction SMME. Affirmative action policies encourage women to enter male-dominated jobs and seek funding in order to establish their own companies with the assistance of loans.

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According to Mitchell (1998) job creation by women-owned construction SMMEs is considered a vehicle for empowering ‘historically disadvantaged communities’ because this type of employment is labour-intensive where skills are learnt on the job. Similarly the employment of workers from the local community is part of government’s strategy to alleviate poverty by creating jobs, even if they are poorly paid and temporary (Mitchell: l998). International literature posits a contrary viewpoint. The image of the construction industry is that it does not provide ‘decent work’. The lack of training and skill formation contribute to the unattractiveness of a career in construction (ILO Report 2001:2). In India, women construction workers were denied access to training. They were employed as part of a family work unit, where the piece rate system encourages workers to engage their wives and children to increase output. The ILO Report (2001) notes that in these circumstances women were not on the payroll of any contractor and may not receive any direct payment.

Notwithstanding these contrary views, Black South African women are using agency to make choices that make the most sense to them (Kabeer 1999). Therefore, Black construction workers have taken up temporary contracts and women-owned SMMEs are endorsing women’s right to economic independence by reinforcing their attempts at financial freedom.

5.6 Women-Owned SMMEs’ Ability to Compete with Large Construction Companies

Government social policy promotes the empowerment of women by targeting them in the procurement process. Targeting is considered part of government’s commitment to broad social development through a targeted procurement programme 59 aimed at promoting preferential treatment for women. Nunes’ (l998) study on women SMMEs in South Africa has indicated that start-up capital by female entrepreneurs is met by personal savings or loans from friends or family members. Because of women’s lack of an asset base, banks charge female-owned enterprises high interest rates because they are categorised as high-risk clients (Nunes l998).

59 This is part of the Ministry of Public Works Ten Point Plan aimed at promoting an enabling environment for Small Medium Micro Enterprises and emerging businesses to participate in government procurement programmes. See Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act no. 5, 2000.

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Black entrepreneurs, especially women, operate in a very competitive business climate. As Rogerson (l999) argues, because of their vulnerable financial position and the small-scale nature of their enterprise, they face unfair competition from big companies and the predatory practice of larger enterprises for downward plundering of contracts. Thus, women entrepreneurs or small contractors in the construction sector have been unable to ensure financial viability and therefore are unable to make choices which enhance the livelihoods of their families. When tenders are awarded the sub-contractor must have the mandatory ten percent performance guarantee required by the tender board. For small enterprises with little cash flow, it is difficult to find the necessary funding. Financial institutions have discriminatory practices in relation to the credit available to male and female lenders. Banks provide women with a credit limit of R500 00060 while men are provided with a limit of R5 million61 (Huirisa Newsletter cited in Budlender et al. l998: 126).

5.6.1 Research Findings

Findings reveal that small enterprise owners have difficulty competing with large construction companies. In l998, when the SCC won the tender for their first project, like other small contractors, especially women-run businesses, the SMME did not have the necessary funding to finance the contract.

As FH notes:

‘As a small contractor we needed to buy the materials, employ staff and hire equipment without any start-up capital. We negotiated a bridging loan from a major contractor to purchase the materials and when we completed the contract we repaid the loan.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC, August l999)

Therefore, meeting financial commitments to pay for tender guarantees or wages on completion of the contract are worrisome for small construction SMMEs. FH noted that as a sub-contractor of

60 Equivalent to approximately €50 000. 61 Equivalent to approximately €500 000.

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a large construction company, the enterprise is vulnerable to the booms and slumps in the construction industry (Interview FH, female owner, SCC, August, l999).

According to FH:

‘This process becomes self-defeating because a critical mass of women contractors could influence the representation of women and their capacity to alter the perceptions of construction as a male domain.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner SCC, August l999)

Research findings indicate that debt can be incurred for start-up costs due to a lack of information or expertise and may lead to an under estimation of these costs especially in the hiring of equipment. Respondents indicate that these practices discriminate against women who do not have the financial guarantees required by the banks. The collateral underpinning loans required by banks is an inappropriate (and discriminatory) mechanism as small businesses owned by women generally have few assets other than those used directly in the generation of income.

According to FH:

‘Most women entrepreneurs lack a personal asset base because they have limited access to home or land ownership.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC August l999)

As FH lamented:

‘We had no funds to set up our first contract and we struggled to get the Maputo Joint Venture to succeed. We had to find finance because we didn’t have the 10% performance guarantee required by the tender board. So we negotiated a bridging loan from the major contractor to purchase the materials and when we finished the contract we repaid the loan.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC, August l999)

A further problem experienced by female small-scale road contractors is the delay in receiving payment for work done. These delays frustrate workers on the project because they are not paid on time. According to FH, ‘suppliers don’t want to wait for their money and once workers finish the

job they expect to be paid.’ (Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC, August l999). FH, as the owner of SCC is responsible for the payment of wages for workers employed on the contract. However, sub-contractors like the SCC are dependent on payment from the contractor to meet financial

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commitments. When delays occur, the contractor is not responsible for the high bank charges charged to sub-contractors for late loan repayments.

During interviews, women entrepreneurs spoke of the difficulties in raising loans and many felt that it was because the banks still had reservations about Black women who did not possess the collateral required to secure the loan (Interview, female Focus Group SMME owners, August l999). Women interviewed relied on their families to assist with loans in establishing their SMMEs. According to FH, her husband supported her in the setting up of the SMME. However, the women entrepreneurs in allied industries were not as fortunate because they relied on funds from Stokvels. Interview data show that formal equality as stated in the S.A Constitution conflicted with women’s ability to realise their economic independence because they were unable to secure the finance required to build their businesses.

5.6.2 Analysis of Research Findings

The interview data highlighted that while the sub-contractor is bound by the guidelines stipulated in the job contract, the nature of contract is such that the awardees cannot compete with the larger construction companies because women owned SMMEs lack both the human and financial resources required to build the necessary infrastructure. This viewpoint is confirmed by Nunes (1998) in her research project which confirms that the adherence of financial institutions to conventional business practices reinforces the disadvantaged position emerging women contractors’ face when setting up their businesses. At the time of the interviews, a private company had awarded three of the 20 contracts to women-owned businesses for road cleaning and road building. Another company awarded 10 out of 240 contracts to women (Commission on Gender Equality l999). The limited number of awards result in a small percentage of female sub-contractors gaining contracts and the minority group of women cannot shift the male bias in the construction industry.

The female interviewees highlighted that as small sub-contractors, any delay in payment by the major contractor compounds the financial risks for them. Delays occurred in spite of the report by Mr. Green of the Stocks and Stocks Basil Read Bouygues Joint Venture on the N4 Toll Road to Maputo in which he notes that of the companies who sub-contracted to them during the time spent on the project, the women entrepreneurs in construction were the most loyal and

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conscientious in their approach to the work. In his opinion they showed ‘excellent initiative’ in producing a very fine standard of workmanship and good quality work (Notes from SA Women in Construction Conference 2000:19 cited in Verwey 2006).

Therefore, alternate forms of collateral should be acknowledged. For example, the valuation of a government assisted home could be used as collateral for a loan. Or by placing a value on women’s reproductive roles as mothers, housekeepers or role models as work equivalent to a particular monetary value. Another is a letter of reference from a successful businessperson who will vouch as a guarantor because of the collegial work relationship that has been established. These different forms of guarantees would allow women to begin to access loans as independent entrepreneurs.

5.7 Power Relations between Men and Women Workers in the Construction Workplace

Historically, the construction sector is considered a capital-intensive industry that is dominated by men. Cockburn (l988) notes that myths surrounding the sector as a male domain are linked to conventional ideas that technical knowledge and competence are attributes of masculinity. Studies on women’s work have revealed that each technological procedure creates a process of gendering, defined either as feminine or masculine (Cockburn l988). This view is confirmed by labour market segmentation theorists, who note that in both the primary and secondary labour markets, men and women participate in different labour processes or sub-processes. Roldan (l996:64) notes that women often operate different physical technologies that require skills or knowledge, which have become defined as male or female. The construction industry is no exception to this rule because it is a male domain where men are considered to have the technical skills and knowledge of the industry. This social construction of skill entrenches the sexual division of labour because most women working in the sector are classified by the civil engineering industry as semi-skilled, performing mainly manual, repetitive and monotonous tasks.

5.7.1 Research Findings

Research data reveals that some of the opposition to women’s roles in construction has stemmed from men opposed to women entering the formal construction sector.

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According to FH, this opposition is:

‘Based on the men’s belief that women are now encroaching on an industry based on strength and skill – traits seemingly held only by men. Those men in the formal construction sector regard the work as inappropriate for women because it is considered an unsafe environment. Furthermore, it is believed that women do not have the physical strength required to operate the heavy drilling machines and cement mixers nor possess the ability to climb the scaffolding.’

(Interview, FH, female owner, SCC, August l999)

According to FH some women are also opposed women entering the male domain of construction. In the interview she stated:

‘there were women keen to learn the skills of road building who joined the SCC, but we also encountered opposition from women who thought that construction is for men and kept saying –‘ we can’t manage this type of job’.’

(Interview, FH, female owner, SCC, August 1999)

Interview data revealed that for some time now, participation in the domestic construction industry has become an integral part of a Black woman’s unpaid family work from a young age. As noted in an earlier section of this chapter, women have displayed dexterity in the building of family homes and in exercising different levels and forms of knowledge of the domestic construction sector. In the group interview, it was stated that:

‘Women’s contribution has largely gone unrecognised because in the formal world of work technical competence is considered a male trait acquired through formal technical training and is acknowledged through certification.’

(Interview, female Focus Group SMME owners, August l999)

In the construction industry men often transfer their skills through mentoring or twinning62. The men demonstrate the task while the women work alongside them. ‘Learning by doing’ is a popular method for the enhancement of workplace skills training. This particular method challenges both the sexual division of labour and the artificial boundaries of gender-specific tasks. The twinning

62 According to DK, coordinator of SCC, the skilled artisans function as catalysts for women wishing to learn a new skill. Women work alongside a skilled artisan who teaches them how to perform a task. They repeat the action related to the task and this is called twinning (Personal communication, September l999).

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process demonstrates not only that men do not have inherent skills and knowledge of the construction industry, but also that men and women have the capacity to learn similar skills. In the example of the SCC, functional flexibility has the potential for the development of different scenarios, which not only enhance the skills of women but also provide opportunities for job rotation and control over the intensity of the work pace to suit the needs of women’s reproductive activities.

Research data indicates that small sub-contracting firms do provide opportunities for the multi-skilling and multi-tasking of women workers (DBSA 2005/06). The example of the SCC as a women-owned enterprise provides insights into the manner in which knowledge on gender relations is being constructed in the Spatial Development Initiatives, especially the Maputo Development Corridor. However, many of the skills of painting and bricklaying were acquired as part of their unpaid labour in the domestic construction sector.

According to FH:

‘Women are employed to clean the road, paint the lines, place the cats’ eyes, erect fencing and pave the kerbsides.’

(Interview, FH, Female owner, SCC August 1999)

Although women are encouraged to work in construction, they remain marginal in the industry because the sexual division of labour in the sector confines them to unskilled work. I observed women standing around the Trans African Concession (TRAC) offices in the hope of finding employment (Field notes l999). I did not interview them but observed their interactions with each other. I listened to women speaking to each other about the chance to find work even though it was lowly-paid and below the trade union rate for a similar job (Field notes l999). Another observation was that it is the men who are the supervisors, and who surface the road, drive the tractors, operate the earth-moving equipment, work the drills and mix the cement and tar (Field notes l999). FH and her female workers lived in tents near the construction site. Their living conditions were similar to their male counterparts for the duration of the contract. There were no special privileges for women who worked the same long hours under the same climatic conditions (Field Notes l999). The women lived as single persons without childcare facilities. In order to take up the employment contract, women had to make childcare and parenting arrangements at their home in order to work on the construction site. There were no facilities for women’s special needs

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(Field notes l999). Despite the temporary nature of their employment contract, women would have to insist that the construction site be altered to meet women’s special needs, especially for a day care centre to be established in a nearby suburb.

Because women work at community level, painting schools or refurbishing roads in the local area, men have increasing levels of respect for their female counterparts and work harder to protect themselves (Interview, female focus Group, August 1999). This sentiment is not shared by women employed at certain professional levels of the construction sector because they fear their appointments represent tokenism since their professional integrity and has often been questioned by their male counterparts. Mainly White males dominate the top echelons of the engineering profession. These White men regard women entering a male domain as akin to the act of diluting the profession and dropping standards. This is a viewpoint expressed by Rees (l992:17) who notes that when women enter certain professions like law and medicine, policies were revised to include women but new patterns of gender segregation emerged indicating that women did not enjoy the same status or benefits as their male counterparts. Because of these stereotypes, women entrepreneurs are taken advantage of and have difficulty collecting payment for services rendered. South Africa has a history of patriarchal domination and tends to devalue the financial rewards of certain jobs once women excel in the sector, and many of those women working as subcontractors are paid the same wages as labourers (Field notes l999). Thus, although government policies may facilitate women’s empowerment, it remains necessary that multinational companies owned by White males with mainly male employees must recognise women’s right to equality.

The literature reviewed (Rogerson l999, the DTI website) noted that job creation is one of the major objectives of the Maputo Development Corridor where the SCC is located but that only 600 jobs had been created by l998. According to the Commission on Gender Equality Report (1999:23), to encourage community participation, the Trans African Concession (TRAC) set up community forums but there were no women representatives on these forums. According to the Commission on Gender Equality Report (l999), the purpose of the community forum is to provide the community with a voice and to draw on their traditional knowledge of the area in the construction of the N4 Toll-Road project. The forum has the role of a watchdog in terms of social development issues such as local labour practices, adherence to ecological codes, and the involvement of SMMEs, training and development initiatives, and the awarding of tenders. One

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representative from each working group is elected to the adjudication committee for tenders (Commission on Gender Equality, l999:23). There are few women on the forum (Commission on Gender Equality, l999). Although the concept of community empowerment is employed in the SDI policy framework, it has become a platform for the empowerment of men as women’s lack of participation on the community forums precludes them from the decisions made in relation to executing government policies in the community. Consequently, women from the local community may be employed but the lack of women in decision-making on community forums results in the community not being able to influence the company to cater for women’s special needs as parents. As FH observes, many women have accepted this stereotype, therefore further mitigating women’s entry into the formal construction sector. In addition, the complex interweaving of women’s paid employment with unpaid family labour makes it extremely difficult to codify the latter in this particular sector. This is a consequence of the recruitment patterns but also of education opportunities, which discourage women’s entry into technical professional training or apprenticeships.

This marginalisation is reflected in the interviews with women who had mixed experiences of working in a male-dominated environment. But, interviewees believe their success must not be judged simply as an instrument for making economic gains, but as a means of developing the capacities of those involved in it, particularly the capacity for self-organisation. As women entrepreneurs in the focus grouped opined, women SMME owners with short contracts feel they have some economic independence because they have their own income. These women are being empowered to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied them (Kabeer l994) There was agreement amongst the interviewees that women start out in their respective industries as temporary workers painting the schools or laying bricks.

As VB stated:

‘It is through their female networks that they share information on prospective contracts.’

(Interview, VB, female entrepreneur Focus Group, August l999)

As women in a focus group told me:

‘Women also took on other forms of paid employment as shop packers, or as vendors of fruit and clothing between one contract and the next.’

(Interview, Female Focus Group, August l999)

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The women also relied on the social network created by participating in short course programmes in order to assist them to find new employment opportunities or subcontracts. Similarly, women-subcontractors do appear to have some economic independence while they have contracts, but this independence is not guaranteed and is often short-lived. The interviewee data highlighted that the major reason why women cannot compete with their male counterparts in the workplace is the temporary nature of their contracts as SMME owners.

5.7.2 Analysis of Research

The literature reviewed illustrates that there is a common perception, both in government and business circles that the labour-based method of road development would serve as a catalyst for job creation. However, interview data indicates that the jobs being created are casual or temporary contract positions due to the fact that employment spans the duration of the contract and this consequently introduces different forms of flexibility, especially flexible and casual employment practices, which, it can be argued, encourages and shapes the technological changes determined by this approach to road construction. By learning the skills of construction, women are breaking the stereotypes of skill and strength as traits held by men. They are also becoming self-empowered and are building their confidence to perform jobs formerly held by men. As Elson observes, flexibility in the pattern of production alters the technical division of labour so that it becomes less rigid, often encouraging flexible specialisation (l996:36). The result of this type of flexibility can be regarded as an increase in functional, numerical and financial flexibility. Flexibility of the skills transferred chip away at the technical division of labour because the introduction of labour-based construction required fewer skilled workers. In this context, women would in the long-term be able to shift the decision-making power in the workplace because they would be the managers, technicians as well as the unskilled workers.

Feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir (l952:262) increasingly contested this male bias within development discourse by providing evidence that women could define themselves outside the male/female dyad and thereby become the subject rather than the object of analysis. Feminist scholars support this viewpoint by observing that the subordinate role of women in the labour market is a result of the occupational segregation and not because of capabilities based on gender (Cockburn l988). For example, enterprises take advantage of pre-existing gender differences and the domestic division of labour in the structuring of occupational segregation and

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codification of sexist employment practices. Evidence from an earlier study conducted by the Commission on Gender Equality shows that 76% of the local community was employed (Commission on Gender Equality l999: 25). Furthermore, women accounted for 6% of the workforce of which 2% were classified as Africans. Women contractors made up 7% of women employers (Reconstruct l999:3). Despite government policies, women remain marginalised in the formal sector. Based on the employment statistics, it is obvious that women are unable to alter the power relations within the workplace.

In the short-term women will not be able to shift the boundaries of this male-dominated industry for two reasons. Firstly, the majority of women need to be convinced that they are able to perform these jobs and learn the skills of managing large construction projects. Secondly, women contractors do not have the asset base necessary to compete with large multinational companies because they cannot raise the collateral funding required for the contracts. In the longer term, the success of this small group of women in construction as role models will develop a critical mass and may be able to shift the perceptions towards enhancing women’s emancipatory roles within male-dominated jobs, thereby creating an opportunity for gender equality in the industry. The participation of women in road construction has the potential to restructure the sexual division of labour within the industry because they are challenging the traditional roles of men. For Desai (2010) this element of empowerment is part of the process involving change over time. Women SMME owners are challenging the unjust social structures and institutions related to patriarchy in the construction industry.

5.8 Evidence of Joint Decision-Making Processes in the Home

Literature on women’s participation in the labour market indicates that institutions are constructed on the assumption that women employees are secondary earners who are able to draw on the earnings and assets of the men within their household. In fact, women’s entry into paid employment could involve additional costs of transport, clothing, accommodation and childcare. As a result women entering employment previously reserved for men will not have the necessary workplace support systems of crèches or health care facilities. Elson (l999:615) notes that even if significant costs of participation are not involved, women may find that once they are earning their own income, there is an offsetting reduction in income transfers from non-market sources, especially from the fathers of their children. She goes further to state that often women have

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extended social entitlements, which do not have the force of law. Elson (l999:615) emphasises that these are sanctioned by cultural norms and practices negotiated within the context of the household. In the final analysis, flexible work practices place women in a vulnerable position as short-term contract workers.

5.8.1 Research Findings

Research data reveals that working class women like FH do not have an asset base, which cushions her during periods between contracts, or when payments are late and her decision-making power within the family is weak. This is because she may/may not be able to determine how the family financial resources are distributed. In the interview, FH acknowledges that her decision to own a SMME is supported by her husband, but long waiting periods between contracts must surely place a strain on family relationships or budget planning. A similar pattern could be assumed for the women working in allied industries. While the majority of the women interviewed were single mothers, the shifting roles between entrepreneurs, own account operators and workers within a construction company affect these women’s ability to alter the boundaries of decision-making within their households.

5.8.2 Analysis of Research Findings

The interview data highlighted that women’s economic contribution has become visible and recognised because women play an important and vital role within the household. However, the financial rewards from short term nature of the contracts may not be enough to make long-term decisions affecting the household. Therefore, women’s social emancipation may not be enough or sufficient to shift decision making within the home because they cannot guarantee any long-term financial freedom and consequently remain reliant on their spouses or family members to assist them between contracts. These financial obstacles hamper financial planning within the household and family, which disadvantages women with family responsibilities from taking contracts without the collateral funding.

Therefore, women entrepreneurs who have short-term contracts cannot plan because they lack the ability to make long-term financial commitments. Women’s inability to address these limitations, mean they may not be able to alter the decision-making power within the family.

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Notwithstanding these circumstances, empowerment for women is the awareness that they have agency to make choices which may or may not transform their subordinate position within both the home and at the workplace (Kabeer l999).

5.9 Reasons for Accepting Poorly Paid Sub-contracts

FH, the owner of SCC, lives in Soshanguve, an African township outside Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. Like the other women interviewed in this chapter, she suffered racial discrimination and prejudice during the apartheid period. She has learnt many of her skills on short course programmes or mentoring by skilled artisans and these skills were not easily available to African women during the apartheid period. As FH indicated, her husband supports her endeavours to establish a construction company and has encouraged her to build her career as an owner and manager (Interview with FH, female owner, SCC, August l999). Unlike some of the single mothers working in the allied industries, FH feels confident that her husband will assist with the parenting while she is away on a work contract (Field notes l999).

5.9.1 Research Findings

In the interview, FH shared her vision regarding her ultimate career goal in construction. One of her aims is that these newly acquired skills will assist her in becoming a professional engineer (Field notes l999). Similarly, the interviews conducted with women in allied industries, indicate that participation in the labour market provides an opportunity for skills training and improved life options. The SCC case supports this point because women constructing the N4 highway are guided, advised and mentored by skilled men.

Moreover, the women who rehabilitate schools, road or municipal offices have learnt skills that were formerly confined to male jobs. The research data reveals that these are poorly paid contracts indicating that the jobs of painting or cleaning of roads or buildings are not considered highly-skilled jobs. Therefore, the intersection of gender and race in terms of women in construction reveals they consider these skills training courses as providing skills that will lead them to better paid contracts.

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5.9.2 Analysis of Findings

The career goal of becoming an engineer may not unattainable in the short-term, but FH, given the correct career guidance and her ability to meet university entrance requirements, may be able to study modules and components of the engineering discipline and qualify as an engineer in the long-term. This certainly was not an option for someone without a university entrance during the apartheid period. While FH’s optimism to train as an engineer must be encouraged, her opportunity as an owner of a SMME does place her in an advantageous position over the other women interviewed. Because of FH’s family support, she is most likely to take future short-term sub-contracts because the skills learnt may be different and the accumulation of different skills may enhance her capacity to become a qualified engineer. Similarly, the women employed as painters or cleaners may take on other short-term contracts which teach them different skills such as carpentry, brick-laying or plumbing. The latter will enhance women’s ability to take on contracts for more skilled work and this may encourage contractors to give them longer term contracts. The women at the Women in Construction Conference used the event to network and to share information of forthcoming contracts or courses.

Because many women lack information regarding the tendering process, they often find themselves invited into SMMEs as an owner but have no idea of the profit sharing process or the legal implications of their participation. While it is easy to acknowledge that women can become victims of this process, the different forms of media popularise government preferential tendering processes. Therefore, some women do enter the process in the hope of creating wealth without engaging in the affirmative procurement process in a self-empowering way. This social inequality of access to assets will continue to dog the preferential tendering process until legislation is reformed to include definitions of the local population groups who qualify. But, as Black women become more familiar with the tendering process, they will be able to utilise government processes to their advantage.

Therefore, the reason for taking these short term contracts is that women perceive these as opportunities to create wealth. This fluidity within a former homogenous Black population is directly related to an individual’s relationship to the production process. In other words, the length of the sub-contract and the profit margins linked to it assist in differentiating the group of entrepreneurs. The shorter the contract, the greater the level of vulnerability towards

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impoverishment or the greater the chance of shifting roles of an owner to an operator. In other words, women SMME owners may be owners for one contract but employed as workers on a different contract. Conversely, the longer the contract, the better the chances of making a huge profit which is able to sustain the owner until the next sub-contract. Thus, the greater the access to longer or permanent contracts with multinational companies, the greater the opportunity to build assets and move up in the strata within a society where access to wealth is no longer confined to people classified as White.

There was a more important reason for taking short-term contracts. In the focus group interview with five women in jobs allied to construction, I was informed that they took these short contracts in order to learn new skills of managing projects. More importantly, accepting short term contracts could also be interpreted as a process of empowerment to determine choice for their families. As the women told me:

'Women wanted to take advantage of new opportunities so that they could be role models for their children.'

(Interview, female focus Group, August 1999)

5.10 Conclusion

5.10.1 Developing a Theory of Marginalisation

The quotation by Lim (l990) that women’s roles in industrial employment is emancipatory, challenges and contradicts the earlier viewpoint held by Elson and Pearson that women further enslave themselves by taking on poorly paid employment. Notwithstanding these contestations and contradictions, a review of the literature on women in the Bantustans illustrate that poorly paid jobs gave women some form of autonomy and an opportunity to live as a family with their children (Hart 2004).

In comparing, contradicting and extending the different theoretical assumptions on women entering the construction industry, I was able to unpack the conceptual framework on the marginalisation for women with short-term contracts because

Establishing a SMME (as part of the government active labour policy) has certainly encouraged women to participate in the preferential procurement processes.

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Consequently, they have exercised choices in spite of the skills and financial limitations they are confronted with. Women became active participants in the start-up phase of the construction of the N4. The report by DBSA (2005/2006) note women had to overcome major obstacles including their own gender socialisation, the lack of incentives attracting women into the sector, limited access to finance, shortcomings in tendering skills, few technical skills and a hostile construction environment.

Notwithstanding all the challenges, women operating as women-owned contractors took hold of the opportunity to secure some measure of financial viability, but whether they are able to shift the boundaries in order to incorporate their needs in the workplace is debatable. SCC had the opportunity to secure a loan from the main contractor, a multinational company, as a source of collateral in order to set up their current project.

Because of the insecure nature of temporary employment or short-term contracts, the different groups of women depend on the collective action of trade unions, women’s groups or social networks to promote their interests. This group has established a social network to promote their interests and it is the solidarity of women in similar precarious financial situations that breaks the boundaries of isolation normally confronted by owner/operators of SMMEs.

This process is experienced as psychological emancipation because it breaks the feelings of isolation and provides an opportunity for sharing ideas and solving problems related to women’s entry into a male domain.

While the majority of women interviewed depend largely on meeting consumption needs through income earned, various mechanisms of protecting livelihoods or job creation include targeted employment on state projects or projects carried out with the assistance of government procurement policies.

The flexibilisation of the labour market creates different permutations of contracts for women in construction, which are directly linked to their marginalisation within the industry. These women entrepreneurs may be owner/operators of SMMEs because between contracts they are employed as workers in other SMMEs or industries allied to construction. Thus, their class positions within society are directly linked to their roles in

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construction which switch between owners and workers depending on the nature of the contract (as a subcontractor) and the type of work (as a waged worker) available at the time.

I concur with von Holdt and Webster (2005), who note that the gendered production structure has been likened to a class-based hierarchy:

The core are workers in permanent employment with better benefits and social entitlements and who are better able to organise their households and make decisions regarding their lives. These are working people who understand the affirmative action preferential processes that promote women and these women (amongst others) have access to information on the available sub-contracts.

Toward the outer circle, are workers employed by non-core or informal zones or sub-contractors and hired through third-party providers, home workers and migrant workers (von Holdt and Webster 2005).

Women employed in the non-core and informal zones have little bargaining power to negotiate the terms of their contract or they may be employed without an employment contract.

The Black women in this case study form part of the non-core (second zone) or informalised section (third zone) of the construction. However, access to sub-contracts created fluidity between the second and third zones of workers.

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CHAPTER 6: WOMEN WORKING IN THE FISHING INDUSTRY

‘No strong export performance by any developing country in manufactured goods, which are characterised by marked labour intensity, has ever been secured without reliance on women workers.’

(Joekes l995)

6.1 Introduction

This chapter follows a similar pattern of analysis to Chapter 5 on Women in Construction which builds a case study on the owner/own account operator of the SMME who takes advantage of the promotion of women in post-apartheid social policies. However, that is where the similarities end because this chapter analyses the research on women working in the fish processing industry for a weekly wage. In addition, the research examines women SMME owners who are sub-contracted to provide services in the fish processing industry. Interviews were conducted with women and men in the fishing industry and various stakeholders including Coloured female seasonal workers, male fishers, women entrepreneurs, representatives of non-government organisations who offer training to women and a human resource manager of the local fishing factory. Some men were interviewed in order to assess the impact the new social policies have on their lives. In addition, interviews were conducted with women fishers and entrepreneurs who lived in the nearby Coloured township in Saldanha Bay.

Using Miles and Huberman’s (l994) qualitative research method, the chapter analyses the research findings on women in fishing production in order to contribute towards building the theory of marginalisation. The findings weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of casual, flexible and temporary work for women, and the manner in which these manifest themselves in terms of race, class and gender. The first step toward analysis was to categorise the findings and these are developed into themes presented as sub-sections in the chapter.

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Figure 3: Case Study of Women and Men Fishers who live in Paternoster and Saldanha Bay

The women and men interviewed have lived in Paternoster and Saldanha Bay for most of their lives. The fishing industry has been shaped by discriminatory legislation and practices during the apartheid period. During the interviews many fishers described life under apartheid and the manner in which it had changed with the new democratic dispensation. As stated in Chapter 1, the men interviewed were members of a community fishers’ fraternity. The Community group is coordinated by a woman whose husband is a fisher. The women interviewed were employed primarily as seasonal workers at the local fish processing company or as small entrepreneurs. Women have significant roles in shore-based activities: making and repairing nets, preparing bait and processing and selling fish. In addition, women collect mussels and other shellfish off the rocks. The interviewees live in the geographical area known as the West Coast Spatial Initiative which is a Spatial Development Initiative. As stated in Chapter 2, the Spatial Development Initiatives (SDI) collectively demonstrates a new phenomenon in South Africa. Furthermore, there has been limited research regarding the impact of the different social policies on the lives of working women and their organisations. The SDIs as Development Corridors have been established as vehicles to kick start economic development in particular geographical areas. Traditionally, industries in the SDIs are similar to those of the former Bantustans where labour legislation was not necessarily adhered to. Thus far, evidence on the shift in responsibility from state and employers regarding issues related to social security to women and families, or of its likely outcomes for society, government, and the private sector has not been proven. This is because many of the industries planned for the SDIs like the Saldanha Steel plant did not materialise. Thus, the focus of the interviews was an attempt to establish the manner in which social policies of preferential treatment for women benefited or disadvantaged them.

Fishing has been a source of sustainable livelihood for the inhabitants of the fishing village called Paternoster on the West Coast, 140 km from Cape Town. Paternoster, like many coastal communities in South Africa has a long history of harvesting marine resources such as fish, shellfish and rock lobster or crayfish for their livelihoods (Sunde:2002). Sunde (2002) estimates that 30 000 subsistence or artisanal fishing people depend on these resources to survive and an additional 30 000 are employed seasonally in the fishing industry. Fishers living in Paternoster are members of the Langebaan Lagoon, which forms part of the local stakeholders’ forum63. This fishing village is marked by numerous little White Reconstruction and Development Programme64 and Sea Harvest65-owned houses. These are the homes of people who either work as fishers or in fishing production at the local fish factory, Sea Harvest. A short distance away is the residential area accommodating the wealthy homeowners who live in huge houses. The class

63 The Marine Living Resources Act (1998) recognised commercial, recreational and subsistence fishing, and thus provided some legal recognition to some of these fishers, for the first time. The MLRA defines a subsistence fisher as ‘a natural person who regularly catches fish for personal consumption or for the consumption of his or her dependants, including one who engages from time to time in the local sale or barter of excess catch, but does not include a person who engages on a substantial scale in the sale of fish on a commercial basis’ (MLRA 18 of 1998: 12).

64 These houses are sponsored by the housing programme of the current government. 65 Sea Harvest Factory was established in 1964 and is located in Saldanha Bay 140km outside Cape

Town. All sea frozen production is exported, with the key markets being the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK. (http://www.sea-world.com/seaharvest/ Accessed 16 March 2009).

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divide is stark with the huge houses facing the seashore and within walking distance of the sea and the working class homes built up on the hillside.

A fish market is being developed in Paternoster as an employment creation project. The market has a café selling fried fish and chips, sweets and cool drinks.

6.2 Findings and Analysis of Research

A number of themes and sub-themes were developed in the process of interpreting the different aspects of Miles and Huberman’s qualitative research method (1994). The different themes are intersected with the concepts of emancipation and equality to assess whether these processes have benefited the women interviewed. Therefore, each section describes the different policies related to that particular theme, the data from the interviews arranged by themes is presented, followed by an analysis of the data supported by secondary literature. The themes being addressed are:

Social policies promoting women and previously disadvantaged persons in labour-intensive work in the fishing industry.

Social policies promoting government procurement policies.

Women’s empowerment through skills transfer and job creation.

Women owned-SMMEs' ability to compete with large fish processing companies.

Power relations between men and women in the fish processing workplace.

Evidence of joint decision-making processes in the home.

Reasons for accepting poorly paid jobs.

6.3 Social Policies Promoting Women and PDIs in Labour-intensive Work in the Fishing Industry

Employment equity and affirmative action policies promote women as employees and employers in the fishing industry. Similar to the construction industry, the fishing industry has been influenced by government active labour market policies that promote the establishing of SMMEs. This is because discrimination based on race is an offence in terms of the South African

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Constitution and the Bill of Rights. However, policies promoting Development Corridors highlight labour-intensive employment as the route to addressing the high levels of unemployment in South Africa.

6.3.1 Research Findings

6.3.1.1 Labour-intensive Casual Jobs

During the interviews conducted at a nearby hotel in April and September 2003, groups of fishers could be seen walking around the Saldanha Bay Harbour, a nearby fishing village where the Sea Harvest Factory is located. On the few occasions during which I addressed the fishers they informed me that they were unemployed. This information was a response to my enquiry regarding the kind of work they do. These responses were honest conversations with me, a stranger whom they met along the street66.

Research data reveals that Coloured women in Paternoster work mainly as seasonal workers in the nearby fish processing factory.

According to JZ:

‘Before dawn, the factory horn would blow to alert women to prepare for work. Women employed in fish production pack fish into cans. We work long hours under extremely harsh, icy conditions and suffer chronic health problems because of the work. We have no health care benefits to address the chronic illnesses related to the harsh work conditions. Our families endure many hardships because parents work long hours in the fishing industry and many older children, mainly the girls, are forced to leave school at an early age to care for their siblings.’

(Interview, JZ, female, seasonal packer, wife of OR, April 2003)

Some women seasonal workers have taken advantage of job training programmes being offered by local non-government organisations (NGOs). For example EF informed me of her plans for employment as a fisherperson (Interview, EF, female, domestic worker, April 2003). She lived in

66 Field notes: Random conversations were conducted with fishers who were unaware that I was a researcher.

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White City, a Coloured township in Saldanha Bay. She had been trained to fish from a boat, learning how to prepare the bait for the sinker before hooking it to the fishing rod. Her enthusiasm for an independent income as a skilled worker spilled over into our conversation (Interview, EF, female, domestic worker, April 2003).

Notwithstanding this enthusiasm, EF has not worked as a fisher. In the interview EF told me:

‘I take on day jobs as a domestic worker in local white suburban homes. As she stated, this income feeds her children because she is unable to find employment as a fisher because of the constraints on fishing quotas.’

(Interview, EF, female domestic worker, April 2003)

EF’s experience resonates with many of the women who participated in the research project. Data indicates that women are enthusiastic about the post-apartheid legislation that promotes women in male-dominated jobs, but to date are unable to find suitable employment to match their newly acquired skills.

LL, one of the two women who work on the sewing project, is a trained fisher who cannot find employment in Saldanha Bay. She trained as a line fisher because she believed that the local fish processing factory would employ her on completion.

She informed me that

‘She was denied employment because she had no experience of the trade yet men are employed without work experience.’

(Group Interview with WW and VW September 2003)

A possible reason for the lack of jobs for women fishers is men’s opposition to women taking up positions as fisherpersons.

As OR, a male fisher opined:

‘Men have created myths about women’s role and believe you can’t send women to sea. A woman on board is considered bad luck for the fishing catch. Anyway, where will she get the necessary training – she hasn’t got a clue of how to put on a life jacket or what to do in an emergency and I think my experience is that a woman is a woman – a woman’s a person who is panicky and panicking can cause trouble.’

(Interview, OR, male group fishers, April 2003)

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This viewpoint is reinforced by MN, who explained that working on trawlers or small fishing boats is a dangerous occupation. Often, boat owners pick up fishers for casual work and are rewarded or paid with a wage of R1067 per day (Interview, MN, male fisher, April 2003). Loss of life at sea is considered part of the life of a fisherman. Fisher wives complained that it takes a long time to get information regarding the whereabouts of their spouses from the local company who owned the trawler. In spite of government legislation protecting fishers, boat owners do not keep records of whom they take as casual fishers and often do not have contact or personal details of their crew (Interview, MN, male fisher, April 2003). Therefore, the male perspective on women going out to catch fish on a boat may be regarded as their way of protecting women from the harsh realities of work as a casual labourer or the climatic elements of storms and rough seas.

6.3.1.2 Opportunities for Professional Career Development

Research data shows the contrasts to the pessimism of women fisher folk, the data shows the career opportunities for two Coloured women employed as cadet engineers on trawling boats owned by the local multinational fish processing company. While EF has trained as a fisherperson and remains unemployed in the fishing industry, B has employment as a cadet engineer68.

Contrasted to this viewpoint is the perspective of B, who offers a young woman’s experience of working on a fishing trawler as a cadet engineer.

According to her:

‘I like adventure and being in a man’s field. At school I chose subjects like mathematics, physics and motor mechanic service because I thought I was going to work shifts with sailing guards. I chose the subjects because I enjoy fixing mechanical things. I am eligible for an engineering career because I have a school leaving certificate with a university entrance and can train to be a chief engineer on the trawler’. Of the three women cadets, two have chosen careers as engineers and the other has chosen to be a skipper.’

(Interview, B, young female, April 2003)

67 R10 = approximately €1 68 The local fish processing company awards a limited number of placements for women with a high school

matriculation certificate to study as engineers. The first step is to work as an apprentice or cadet and progress through the programme to become an engineer.

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Her work entails going to sea for long periods. On her last trip she was one of two females with four men. She does shift work, including going on trips of 47 days with men on the trawlers. Her tasks include mainly maintenance work, drilling holes, working with the grinder, fixing the pumps and packing and loosening the pumps. She is one of five girls in her family and her father encourages her because it is tough being in a man’s world especially working with men.

She informed me that:

‘Some of them want to break your confidence while another male will encourage you to go for completing the task.’

(Interview, B, young female, April 2003)

Female and male engineers perform similar tasks. Their tasks are to ensure that the ship runs smoothly, that the machinery is running effectively and there is an adequate and functional water supply. The crew (of which one member is a woman) work on deck and in the factory.

In the interview C, the other woman cadet told me that she is part of the crew doing deck work like rope work, working the wingers or working on the bridge. C told me:

‘I monitor the screen to see how much fish there is in the sack wandering on the seabed.’

(Interview, B, young female, April 2003)

During interviews, the women told me that accommodation on the ship had to be altered to cater for women’s feminine needs. B is a self-confident young woman and has developed methods of dealing with male patriarchal behaviour on long trips69.

According to her:

‘Men treat us like tomboys. We like being with the males. Behaving like ‘one of the boys’ shields the women from possible sexual harassment.

(Interview, B, young female, April 2003)

69 Field notes April 2003

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Interviews revealed how men interacted with the women cadets. B told me that on long trips, the men gossip about the women.

‘It is intended to hurt you. After hearing the male comments I tell myself that I am not here for them. I am here for myself and I am making a career for myself, not for them. If you decide to accept what that guy said, you don’t want to go on with your career. Why should you do it because they are getting the benefits of excluding you from the fishing team? Young women experience professional jealousy because some of the guys have been working for the company for 13-14 years and they are still crew members whereas I am an officer.’

(Interview, B, young female, April 2003)

As a young engineering cadet, B is aware of male jealously and the capacity of verbal abuse to break her self-confidence70. She is also more self-assured of her rights within the workplace because she is the first generation of youth to benefit from government affirmative action policies.

6.3.2 Analysis of Research Findings

The research findings show that the fish processing company is the main employer of Coloured women workers in the local area and is able to determine the nature of the work contract. Although, women learn new skills as part of government affirmative action programmes, many women continue to find themselves at the end of the global supply chain and are unable to empower themselves through full-time employment with social benefits.

EF, who works as a domestic worker and B the cadet engineer have both exercised their rights to learn skills of formerly male jobs in the fishing industry and they represent women taking advantage of government’s affirmative action policies. B and C are a minority group of women in the male domain of engineering but their presence pushes at the boundaries of the segregated labour market which formerly excluded women. On the other hand, EF has the skill of fishing but is unable to find employment on fishing trawlers because men have myths about women’s presence on the boats. Therefore, government affirmative action policies affect women differently depending on their age, educational levels and access to work opportunities. In terms of the South African Constitution, the first ten years of schooling are compulsory and free. Therefore, as

70 Field notes April 2003

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more young women complete high school, they will have better work opportunities in the fishing industry than their mothers. Therefore, the intersection of gender and age provides different opportunities for different generations of women. Building a critical mass of cadet engineers will have the potential to challenge and shift the boundaries of male domain of engineering towards a more egalitarian workplace. Therefore, the empowerment process has the potential of transforming unjust social structures and patriarchal institutions because young women have the entrance qualifications to train as engineers.

6.4 Social Policies Promoting Government Procurement Policies

Affirmative action policies promoting women as employers are part of the company procurement policies. Similar to the construction industry, these policies encourage women to establish small enterprises which employ local inhabitants. The Ten Point Programme procurement process awards points to women-owned businesses and previously disadvantaged persons, disabled persons and employment and skills training for local inhabitants. This programme has been reviewed and is now called the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act no. 5, 2000.

6.4.1 Research Findings

Data from a group interview reveals that a group of eight fishers formed a company in order to bid for a seasonal fishing permit. The data shows that one member is a woman but not a senior partner. The quota was easily exhausted because the size of the quota of 240 kg of fish is not enough to sustain the entire group and their respective families for the season (Interview, Group OR, male, April l999). The group of fishers do their own marketing of the catch by selling the fish to local inhabitants at the nearby fish market. Although there is a woman partner she does not go to sea with the group. Her participation ‘is as just one of the people that make it possible for the

senior partner to get hold of the permit’ (Interview, with Group OR 1999). Men interviewed in Paternoster were fishers who had acquired the skill of fishing but had no other employable skills. Conversations with these worried men trying to feed their families who live in a fishing village where there are no other means of earning an income circulated during the interview (Interview, Group OR, April l999).

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6.4.2 Research Analysis

The research findings indicate that the fishing group which has a woman partner has used her participation in order to access the quota rather than building a SMME utilising the government affirmative action processes of skills training in management which could provide business opportunities that could provide sustainable growth for the group. In other words, the female partner is a token partner included in order to ensure that the group conforms to government regulations for a fishing permit. Therefore, this fishing SMME does not practise gender equality because the female partner has not taken advantage of the empowerment process within her community. Nor has she learnt the skills of managing the SMME nor has she learnt the skills of the fishing industry. This particular woman has bought into the patriarchal ideology of the family that acknowledges that a woman should be subordinate to her husband (Rees 1992).

6.5 Women’s Empowerment through Skills Transfer and Job Creation

The reality of the female labour force in the twenty-first century is the increasing incorporation of women in male-dominated employment. Legislation promoting women into male-dominated employment is an opportunity for women to earn equal wages to their male counterparts. However, with globalisation women enter male-dominated employment at the bottom of the ladder in terms of skills and wage levels. Moreover, the feminisation of the industry has informalised this particular labour market where employers determine the rate of pay.

6.5.1 Research Findings

On the West Coast where the interviews were conducted, women do not benefit from skills training in the fishing industry because the traditional male small fishers are overtly opposed to women being part of the fishing crew. Research data shows that male fishers interviewed believed women should continue to mend the nets or perform auxiliary tasks of collecting mussels from rocks or cleaning the fish as their role in fish production (Field Notes, April 2003). Von Holdt and Webster (2005) note that this division is exacerbated because of the lack of social security for contract seasonal workers who are non-core workers or 3rd tier workers. Social policies of maternity leave, health benefits or pensions are not extended to these women, as demonstrated

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in the fact that women are expected to return to work fourteen days after the birth of a baby (Field notes 2003).

According to OR:

‘I believe that ‘a woman’s place is at home. Take a woman to sea anything can happen. If she has a call of nature then what do you do when there are men on board the boat. There are no separate facilities for women and there is no privacy for the woman. The man is the roof and it is not like the woman is the floor but okay a woman’s place is at home.’

(Interview, OR, Male group fishers, April 2003)

Research data revealed that women were also trained in hospitality and computer skills. When they closed the sewing project for lack of funding it was not hard for women to seek employment because women felt they could perform tasks formerly confined to men but encountered opposition from employers.

6.5.2 Analysis of Research

The acquisition of skills in occupations considered male strengthened women’s resolve to break stereotypes and societal tradition which confine women to certain occupations.

However, NH concurred that:

‘Many of the young women undermine themselves by not learning the skills of work considered men’s work. But a minority of young women are training as engineers today.’

(Interview, NH, female entrepreneur, September 2003)

According to Elson (l997), male bias and gender ascriptive relations 71 permeate all social relations. Often women buy into these forms of social relations because these relations are complex – social, economic and political. The case study of fish processing illustrates how social relations between men and women have been permeated by patriarchal values.

71 Gender ascriptive relations are those in which gender is overtly ascribed to the agents involved through the use of terms like husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter (Elson l997:156).

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6.6 Women-Owned SMMEs’ Ability to Compete with Large Fish Processing Companies

The local stakeholder forum is representative of fishers, company representatives and government officials. According to Sunde and Isaacs (2008), the structure while an important and necessary forum, is not an appropriate mechanism for addressing fisher-specific issues as it comprises a range of diverse stakeholder groups, each with very different needs and interests72. In this context, the seemingly neutral discourse of ‘user groups’ (who are the fish processing company or recreational fishers) is problematic because there are different class interests to those of survivalist fisher folk. Consequently, the discourse on rights has become distorted because the forum believes that its task is to balance the rights of different user groups, that is, to ensure the ‘rights’ of the wealthy elite to recreational fishing licences which include the enjoyment and protection of a range of water sports at the expense of the poor fishers who depend on their use of the resource for their livelihoods.

6.6.1 Research Findings

Research findings revealed that the local fishing association has a women’s group which has purchased a licence for a small allocation for crayfish rights. An important condition for the granting of the licence is the inclusion of women in the bid. Once the crayfish are farmed, this process is complete and the contract holders sell the crayfish to the local fishing company. Because women do not have the necessary fishing infrastructure, they sell their product to the local fish processing company. The women process the crayfish, but the packaging, export and marketing of the product is done by the local fish processing company. The local multinational company is able to reap huge profits by exporting the crayfish.

Men feel marginalised because of the new government legislation on fishing quotas. They informed me that licences were granted to boat owners, many of whom are classified as White. Fishers do not gain from the new legislation because they work for boat owners who are not interested in creating sustainable livelihoods by providing permanent employment. Despite the

72 The interviews in this study predate the legislation quoted by Sunde and Isaacs (2008:22) who note that neither fishers with legal rights to fish nor those without are able to participate in the management of the lagoon, and there is no effective mechanism for consultation. These were the sentiments expressed by fisher folk when I interviewed them in the Kleinvissers Association offices.

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importance of the subsistence sector, most Coloured and African fishers were never formally recognised, and fell under the category of recreational fishers, where they were supposed to harvest limited amounts of fish for personal consumption only.

6.6.2 Analysis of Research

It is illegal for fishers who have a recreational permit to sell their catch although most of them make a living by selling their catch (Sunde and Isaacs 2008). Consequently, none of the three different groups, the members of the fisher association, the group of women who have a crayfish licence or the group with the fishing quota (discussed in the earlier subsection) is able to compete with the multinational company. Firstly, the fisher association members are not able to influence the management of the fishing area or the allocation of quotas. Secondly, the women’s group do not have the necessary infrastructure to provide the services offered by the multinational company. Thirdly, the woman licence holder has not utilised her right to lobby for better quotas for fishers. As the political reform process has unfolded over the past 15 years, many subsistence fishers have not been able to compete with global factories because they lack the necessary financial resources necessary to establish their own infrastructure to support the fish processing supply chain from catch to export. Finally, the empowerment process of creating a local stakeholder forum has not manifested as benefit for the local community because the intersection of race and class operate to the advantage of wealthy recreational licence holders who employ fishers on a casual basis.

6.7 Power Relations between Men and Women in the Fish Production Workplace

The local fishing community is part of the local stakeholder forum but scientific research conducted by government does not include their opinions. The fishers are not invited to participate in research into the status of the stocks, their traditional knowledge has not been accommodated and they are not party to the decision making on the total allowable catch (TAC) for the lagoon. As a consequence, they do not support the TAC that has been set, and many of those who do not have rights are harvesting illegally as they believe that there is plenty of fish available. There is no system of co-management in the Langebaan Lagoon. The fishers bear the

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full cost of this approach through the restricted TAC and the tight zoning policy, while a very large number of recreational fishers are permitted to continue to utilise the lagoon.

6.7.1 Research Findings

FK is the chairperson of the SA Fishers Association started in 2000, and states that she is confident to go out fishing in her own boat. She concurs that women can now exercise the choice to own a boat and she employs fishermen to work on her boat. As she indicates:

‘Some women don’t want to go to sea but have commercial rights.’ (FK, female boat owner, September 2003)

Data shows that the permit quotas also include the provision of a skipper’s ticket. These are all achievements of the women’s-only organisation, which lobbied for FK as the chairperson of the SA Fishers Association. In the interview she indicates that some women prefer having commercial fishing rights but prefer not to go to sea. These are all achievements of the women’s-only organisation, which lobbied for the Minister of Transport to facilitate the career development of small boat fishers.

Research data shows that affirmative action policies do promote women’s empowerment to own SMMEs or to bid for fishing licences.

According to FK:

‘Black women did not have small-scale fishing quotas before l994. She knew of two white women who had a fishing quota. As she said: ‘I became a woman fisher as a way to bring bread to the table. For nine years I went out fishing with my husband. At that stage I was married and fishing was a way to generate an income for the family.’

(Interview with FK, female, boat owner, 2003)

FK remarked further:

'Fishing is considered a man’s job, but a job only fit for drunken fishers. This job is seen as degrading.’

(Interview, FK female, boat owner, 2003)

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According to FK, men believe that women do not have the physical strength necessary to perform the tasks associated with fishing or the manual work on a fishing trawler. She acknowledged:

‘Men believe that women are not strong enough to become engineering cadets which are senior positions within the maritime career ladder. Men consider women’s roles on the fishing trawler as crew in the cockpit in the cabin and not on the deck.’

(Interview, FK female boat owner, 2003)

6.7.2 Analysis of Research

Women are marginalised in the fish processing workplace because traditional small fishers have created myths about women’s role within fishing. Employers have taken advantage of men’s patriarchal views of women’s role within the home by preferring to employ men as fishers. The myths have become a reality because male viewpoints have become part of the recruitment policies of large fish processing companies. Notwithstanding these factors, the attempts to break stereotypes and demythologise the negative influence women are supposed to have on the fishing catch are indications that women plan to enter the workplace as equals. The research evidence shows that women have learnt how to utilise the few opportunities open to them to their advantage. FK used the experience as the granddaughter of a mixed race couple to ensure that she is not reliant on an employment contract. As an independent boat owner, she has learnt to negotiate her own fishing quotas with the local government authorities. As the chairperson of the local fishing association, she is able to build the social networks of women keen to enter fishing as a livelihood either as fishers or boat owners. NH’s membership of the local political organisation creates opportunities to network with funders keen to empower women to learn skills allied to fishing. Many of the skills acquired encourage women’s emancipation to earn an income independent of their spouses. Both FK and NH are children of working class families who have used their knowledge of fish production to their advantage and to build gender equality amongst women keen to learn these skills.

6.7.2.1 Creating Alternate Job Opportunities through Skills Training Programmes

Both the fish processing company and the local non-government organisations offer training programmes for women based on government legislation on skills development which provide

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employers with skills levies for encouraging employees to undergo training. Levies are also available for companies who create employment to alleviate poverty. As Auer et al. (2008) and Betcherman et al. (2004) note these levies is an important aspect of the active labour market policy being promoted by the government.

6.7.2.2 Research Findings

GH the director of a local non-government organisation in Paternoster targets women seasonal fisher workers (Interview GH April 2003).

According to GH:

‘Training is made possible through funding from government subsidies for poverty alleviation. Part of the training programme is to build capacity and impart skills on lobbying government on their policies on marine coastal management and the allocation system. This includes skills of advocacy and lobbying: how to organise, speak out and campaign around fishing rights for women by breaking stereotypes. The programme establishes a women’s network focusing on capacity building and awareness-raising on domestic violence. Another focus area is to establish job creation opportunities in order to generate an income towards enhancing the economic independence of local women packers. Skills training also focuses on staff development and specific skills of dressmaking and sewing traditional ethnic clothing, setting up of craft stalls or assisting women to set up a restaurant as tourism projects.’

(Interview GH April 2003)

Because of the lack of start-up capital many women trained in tourism-related skills are unable to establish SMMEs. Instead, women take work as waitresses, domestic workers or cleaners in the hospitality sector cleaning the carpets (Interview GH April 2003).

Another non-government organisation in Saldanha Bay provides training for women wishing to enter the service industries which supply the fishing industry. The programme is headed by a male Chief Executive Officer, who informed me that these programmes are financed by international sponsors and accredited by the Department of Labour. One of his roles is to link the emerging SMMEs with established companies to assist the former to be registered as suppliers of manufactured goods in the fishing industry. Women are targeted to learn the skills of making boiler suits, overalls and protective clothing for the companies. Work placement as an individual or registration as a supplier is not guaranteed by the training institution.

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In the same building, a sewing project is housed. Two women and one man work in this project which makes overalls for workers employed in the fishing industry (Group Interview with LL and VW, September 2003). During the conversation with two women working at sewing machines, I was informed that training took place on the premises and they were also learning the skills of marketing and distribution (Field notes April 2003).

As LL states, the contract for making overalls for the local fish processing factory is made possible because:

‘We got a loan from a local funding agency to purchase the equipment. In addition, loans are made from the creditor to purchase the materials and our distribution network has expanded to a nearby town where bedroom furnishings like pillows and pillowcases are manufactured. The marketing is performed by the male member.’

(Group Interview LL and VW, September 2003)

NH73 and FK74 are members of women’s organisations, and their experiences of building these organisations have assisted them to emancipate themselves by taking advantage of post-apartheid equality legislation. Both women referred to the South African Constitution as a vehicle toward facilitating women’s emancipation. NH’s stride towards economic independence started when she purchased a mobile food stand in order to sell food. With the assistance of her son who was still at university, she sold food over weekends. As time passed, a catering business developed in partnership with three other women – two White women and one Indian woman. When the Saldanha Steel construction company located in the vicinity offered contracts to women in the community most women chose catering and cleaning.

NH says:

‘Women undermined themselves by accepting these short-term contracts. Her business grew and she began to train other women entrepreneurs in the area’.

(Interview, NH, female entrepreneur, September 2003)

73 NH is an elderly Coloured woman born of African parents but reclassified Coloured which allowed her mobility to live in the Western Cape and attend a Coloured school.

74 FK is a middle-aged Coloured woman.

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NH is a member of the local political organisation and has used her organisational links to ensure that the steel company offered work to the local community. She was also acutely aware that the local children could not find apprenticeships because they had not chosen the relevant school subjects of mathematics and science at high school.

In response, NH:

‘set up a non-governmental training organisation in order to train young people and women as welders, pipe fitters, builders and bricklayers.’

(Interview, NH, female entrepreneur, September 2003)

6.7.2.3 Analysis of Research Findings

The women interviewed used their social networks and organisational links to establish training programmes that would create jobs for women in the nearby towns. The empowerment process has built their financial independence and autonomy. Information and knowledge gained through social networks are used to raise awareness of women’s rights to empower women in casual work and teach them that there are options and alternatives to their current situation. Encouraging women to find alternate forms of income generation will dispel myths and stereotypes about women fishers. While, the training programmes create awareness of women’s rights within the fishing industry there is no guarantee that women will break this stereotype. Notwithstanding the reality of local company recruitment policies and male fishers' opinions, women’s groups have created an awareness of their right to social and economic equality.

6.8 Evidence of Joint Decision-Making Processes in the Home

Women’s emancipation from patriarchal marriages and abusive relationships is facilitated by awareness programmes hosted by local non-government organisations. These community-based programmes support and highlight the emancipation of both men and women from racial and gender oppression. The proliferation of media regarding the rights and issues of equality are part of the new dispensation to which the majority of South Africans have access. The right to equality in every sphere of one’s life permeates all social structures and institutions. These different forms of community networks encourage women to embrace different aspects of equality both within the home and the workplace. Legislation empowering women – the South African Constitution and

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Bill of Rights – guarantees the right to safety and the Domestic Violence Act prosecutes perpetrators of domestic violence.

6.8.1 Research Findings

Many of the women interviewed indicated that they had no opportunity to shift the power relations within the home because of their work as seasonal workers in the local factories. The seasonal nature of their work prevents them from influencing decisions on behalf of their family.

JZ indicated that:

‘Because we are away from home for long periods during the day, it is difficult to get my husband to look after the children. Once the fishing quota has been reached, my husband works as a volunteer for a local NGO, and refuses to help with the care of the household.’

(Interview, JZ, female, seasonal packer, wife of OR, April 2003)

The women seasonal packers spoke of high levels of delinquency amongst children because they were left to fend for themselves while their mothers worked long hours. This fishing community experiences high levels of alcohol and drug abuse with the concomitant levels of gender-based violence. NH informed me that:

‘Women seasonal packers and their families live in houses owned by the local fish processing factory. Women pay rentals from their meagre wages and often take home R10 per week. This is the sum total of their take-home wage after they have paid for the rental.’

(Interview, NH, female, entrepreneur September 2003)

In addition, the women support their male spouses, assisting with pre- and post-harvest activities linked to the employment contracts of their male partners. This work remains part of the unpaid family wage. Once the fishing quota is exhausted fishers seek other forms of work in the local retail shops or as casual, unskilled day labourers or gardeners. OR, a male fisher works as a volunteer for a local non-government organisation doing community work. During this time, his wife and other family members support him (Interview with Group OR, male, April 2003). While men are dependent on their partners, the seasonal nature of women’s work in the factories does

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not shift the power relations because the patriarchal authority of the husband continues to reign supreme in the household.

Notwithstanding this fact, research findings indicate that women as mothers provide opportunities for younger women to complete their schooling, enter tertiary education and access more permanent professional careers. The ability of women to insist that their children, especially their daughters complete high school and enter professional careers is an indicator that gender equality may be attained for the younger generation of girl children. NH informed me that she started working at the fishing factory from the age of 16 years. She is a mother of four children and was married under customary law. She is now divorced and has worked for 20 years in the military academy as a chef.

As she remarked:

‘I started working as a washer of dishes, then as a vegetable girl peeling vegetables and from there making salads. I started cooking for ministers who visited the military academy and other important people visiting the academy.’

(Interview, NH, female, entrepreneur, September 2003)

During the interview she informed me that she has a permanent job but that her husband was employed temporarily. NH divorced her husband because she had the resources to support her family. She considers herself the head of the family because she is responsible for the financial and emotional care of her family. Her hard work has paid off for her children. Her son has completed university and practises as an attorney. Her eldest daughter did not pursue post-matriculation studies because she married at the age of 17 and has two children. Her third daughter has a degree in tourism. Her youngest son is 16 years old at high school. Her granddaughter is 14 years old and hopes to train as a medical doctor.

6.8.2 Analysis of Findings

The majority of women’s accounts of their lives indicate an awareness of legal, formal and substantive equality. Due to the short-term nature of the work contracts, it may not be possible for women to alter the decision-making power within the home. However, as mothers they take on these insecure contracts in order that their children may benefit. Interview findings show women’s inability to shift the power relationships within the household because the men interviewed did not

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perceive a change in their family roles when they were unemployed and their wives earned an income as seasonal workers. Women interviewees informed me that their household workload did not lessen when their male spouses were unemployed at home.

Awareness of women’s rights to equality may change their consciousness of how they perceive the world but women’s agency will determine whether they use their formal rights of equality to build more egalitarian relationships in the home.

6.9 Reasons for Accepting Poorly Remunerated Short-term Contracts

This section analyses the lives of NH and FK who have worked in precarious employment for their entire adult lives. Research data of interviews conducted with these two independent women reveals why these two successful entrepreneurs accepted short-term contracts.

6.9.1 Influences on NH’s Life that Encouraged Her to Make Some of Her Decisions

NH worked at the Sea Harvest factory during school holidays. Because the majority of Black women continued to live in the Bantustans eking out a living from home brewing or petty trading as forms of economic activity, this encouraged traditional Bantustan authorities to regulate the mobility of women. Men who lived in the cities worked on the mines and were restricted to living as single men in hostels. The restriction on residential rights for Blacks gave rise to personal subjectivities experienced as racial and gender discrimination and as NH75 who is a mother of four children recalled:

‘My father, who was born in Lesotho, had walked to the gold mines in Johannesburg. He had a work permit and would send money (home) once in while. My mother would visit him in Saldanha Bay. After 2 or 3 years, (of) our (lifestyle) things didn’t change and my mother decided to travel to Saldanha Bay because she had children to feed.’

(Interview, NH, female entrepreneur, September 2003)

75 Interview conducted in Saldanha Bay with NH in September 2003

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NH’s father was a migrant confined to living in a hostel on the gold mines as a single person for eleven months of the year. As the wife of a migrant worker, her mother relied on her father’s remittances to feed and clothe their family. As NH recalled, her mother required a permit in order to live with her father when he took up employment as a fisher:76

‘They ate fish and crayfish on a daily basis. She had 10 years of schooling and while still at primary school she worked during her school holidays in the fish production factory. Her mother, Lesotho by birth, required a (residential) pass to enter a Coloured77 township and would be arrested and jailed by the police. As children, NH and her siblings would accompany her mother to jail because her father was away fishing.’

(Interview, NH, female, entrepreneur, September 2003)

As a child, NH’s identity was formed through experiencing the racial and gender discrimination heaped on her parents. Her parents were classified as African, migrant and non-South African, and were therefore regarded as illegal residents in an urban Coloured residential area. She suffered economic exploitation because the apartheid racial classification system created particular family forms of labour. As children, NH and her siblings used to accompany their father who worked on a trawler boat. When the trawler sailed out to sea, they would climb into the little fishing boats and catch fish with nets. Migrant workers did not own boats and NH’s father was the navigator of the trawler because the boats belonged to the White owner and her father lived on the owner’s property. NH and her siblings were taught to fish at a young age. During the interview NH did not express her experience as a form of oppression because these work stints took place during school holidays. She would get up as early as two or three o’clock in the morning to help her father catch fish. As a child, NH was engaged in child labour and as long as she did not receive the full value of her product, however defined, she was being exploited.

76 NH’s father lived in Paternoster, a Coloured fishing village on the West Coast located in the Cape Province.

77 The Group Areas Act of 1950 (Act No. 41 of 1950) was an Act of parliament created under the apartheid government of South Africa that assigned racial groups to different residential and business sections in urban areas in a system of urban apartheid. An effect of the law was to exclude non-Whites from living in the most developed areas, which were restricted to Whites. It caused many non-Whites to have to commute long distances from their homes in order to be able to work. The law led to non-Whites being forcibly removed for living in the ‘wrong’ areas. Davenport and Saunders (2000:378).

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Because of the intersection of patriarchal racial institutions with social family relations, NH’s mother’s life revolved around avoiding imprisonment. She was only at home during weekends because that was the only time she could avoid the police searches for illegal residents.

NH believes that:

‘Her mother’s subordinate, inhumane lifestyle was borne with dignity by a strong woman who exposed her children to all the sides of life. I know the poverty side, I know the nice side, I know the crying side and it was only at Christmas when we were a family and after the Christmas season her mother started to sleep outside again.’

(Interview, NH, female entrepreneur, September 2003)

As she states:

‘We didn’t even know if my mother who did not have the relevant Pass Book would be jailed while we accompanied my father to sea’. At the time children accompanied their mother to prison. ‘Having my mother jailed was part of our lifestyle. Nightly the policeman would knock at the door to check if my mother was sleeping at home. My mother used to sleep outside in the nearby mountains. We were used to the lifestyle. Sometimes my mother would come back at night to visit us and the policeman would be waiting to arrest her. Our neighbourhood was mixed race and our immediate neighbour was a woman who also required a pass and had given birth to a child in jail.’

(Interview, NH, female, entrepreneur, September 2003)

NH, as an African child living in a Coloured residential area, confirms this viewpoint because she had little economic or social stability.

She notes that:

‘The instability of her family life forced her family to send her to a high school in Cape Town and stay with a Coloured family.’

(Interview, NH, female, entrepreneur, September 2003)

She completed her schooling at the age of 16 years. As a young Coloured woman there were no other job opportunities but to work in the fish production factory because the only resource was the sea. Taking fish home was part of the social wage as a worker in a fish processing factory.

She recalls:

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‘When I worked at the factory during the l960’s, you could take fish home if you wished. Employees could even bring a truck and load it with fish and take it home.’

(Interview, NH, female, entrepreneur, September 2003)

Apartheid is a crime against humanity because of the very negative consequences for Black families, especially young African men, who came to the city as migrants, and for African women who either lived in the Bantustans or worked in urban areas because the only employment opportunities were in the service industries. While the multi-layered identities were overtly racialised, it affected working class men and women most severely. As a young African female and the daughter of migrant parents, NH was sent to a Coloured high school in the city of Cape Town. Cape Town as part of the Western Cape was classified as a Coloured preferential area where people of mixed racial origin worked in unskilled employment and were restricted to live in demarcated residential areas. Unlike her African mother, NH did not require a residential permit because the school authorities registered her as a local resident. Gender relations within this family took on a particular form creating categories of personhood that provided an opportunity for NH to break out of the cycle of migrancy and difference. Because of her racial classification, NH was able to grow up in a Coloured township where the resources were marginally better than those of African townships. However, she still received an education inferior to White girls in her age group.

6.9.2 Different Influences on FK’s Life

FK, the chairperson of the South African Fishing Association, was influenced by her grandmother, a Coloured woman married to a White man who had a recreational fishing permit. She informed me that:

‘Her grandfather drowned when his youngest child was ten years old. In the apartheid period, the government officials withdrew the fishing permit because of her grandmother’s racial classification.’

(Interview, FK, female, boat owner, September 2003)

Before the post-apartheid dispensation, Black people were excluded from getting quotas and were employed by White fishermen or fish processing companies. Sunde (2002) notes that large companies extended their control and a handful of powerful White-owned companies came to

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dominate the industry. This approach squeezed out traditional fishers into marginalised positions eligible for recreational fishing permits. This was unlike the experience of FK’s grandparents who earned a lucrative income from their fishing licence. She informed me that:

‘Her grandparents worked as a team: her grandfather caught the fish, her grandmother accompanied him or prepared the nets; cleaning, processing and cooking the fish, and their children assisted with fish drying.’

(Interview, FK, female, boat owner, September 2003)

Similar to NH’s parents, the Influx Control laws, job reservation and the Group Areas Act affected FK’s grandmother personally. The government officials attempted to remove the children from her grandmother’s care because she was considered unfit as a Coloured mother of children borne from a marriage to a White man. Patriarchal family roles excluded her grandmother from continuing fishing and stripped her of her only source of income.

As she states:

‘Her grandfather’s family claimed the fishing vessel and thereby stripped her grandmother of her livelihood.’

(Interview, FK, boat owner, September 2003)

Her grandmother worked as a domestic worker in Cape Town because she had lost her livelihood and had been stripped of her economic independence when her husband died. FK believes that her grandmother’s actions had influenced her.

According to her:

‘My grandmother had a strong character that would look at a situation, analyse it and make the best of the situation. She never looked for things to undermine her own efforts.’

(Interview, FK, female, boat owner, September 2003)

Williams (l991) opines that gender, along with other categories is one axis of the matrix of domination that imposes boundaries on any woman. Intersectional analysis interrogates conceptual paradigms and boundaries and, when examining NH and her mother’s life experiences, confirms that a woman’s identity cannot be collapsed into uni-dimensional categories, but rather that the category of ‘woman’ is contradictory, contested and conflicted

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because identities are multi-layered, privileging certain women while disadvantaging others. NH has empowered herself to build a SMME that provides a measure of financial independence. This financial freedom, while short-lived, because she is dependent on government contracts, encourages her to create opportunities for her children to have a better education. A similar comment could be made about FK whose childhood was indelibly marked by the inhumane situation of her grandmother. Because of the influence of her grandmother, FK was able to build a fishing business with her husband. As an independent boat owner, it has taken her nine years to build her business and these skills have empowered her to lead the Fisher’s Association. Both women’s life experiences have encouraged them to utilise their positions within social organisations to promote women’s interests.

NH an entrepreneur, FK a boat owner and entrepreneur and BZ a seasonal packer, have aspirations for themselves and their children. These aspirations are similar for their children to have better opportunities in life than what were open to them during the apartheid period. It is important to note though, that their access to the building of assets and the creation of wealth remains different because of the varying nature of their respective access to regular income generation. BZ whose husband is a fisher, informed me of the difficulties she experienced in parenting because she is away from home for long hours. While she faces many challenges to ensure her children are able to have a good education that will give them leverage in the workplace for a better job or setting up a business, this opportunity is not impossible. NH has proven that providing opportunities for her children has benefited the entire family. FK as a boat owner and employer has proven her ability to accumulate assets and wealth. Therefore, the three women are part of a growing stratum of women within society. This stratification within society is hierarchical with FK being able to meet her aspirations for wealth creation much easier than NH who has access to short term contracts. However, NH’s access to wealth creation and asset accumulation is better than BZ who continues to be vulnerable with a survivalist income that may not create economic emancipation in the long term. Therefore, the stratification within small fishing communities is becoming more visible because some women have access to asset accumulation and wealth creation through access to contracts with local government.

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6.10 Conclusion

6.10.1 Building a Theory of Marginalisation

When reviewing the literature on the impact of increased income under women’s control there are many authors who state that financial control by women provides greater autonomy and independence to make household decisions. Sen concurs that women’s well-being in terms of self-perception, but also in terms of external measures, is inextricably linked to that of their family, and also that a high proportion of a woman’s earning contributes directly to meeting the basic needs of household members including children (Sen l990). Thus, Pearson (2007) notes that earning an income may enhance women’s options, but may also intensify their workload and household responsibility without necessarily increasing their autonomy. This, notwithstanding the greater influence over the distribution of household resources and the ability to act and defend women’s interests and those of their family and community in the face of adverse circumstances, is seldom acknowledged or recognised by society (Kabeer 2000). In the literature reviewed on the advantages or disadvantages of women in paid employment, especially the service industry wages and the quality of employment for women are not considered priorities in the global supply chains. Invariably women are employed in the lower echelons of the global supply chains or in firms towards the periphery of production systems (King Dejardin 2008:7).

In this post-apartheid period, women who live and work in these two small fishing villages located in the West Coast SDI face casual employment or short-term contracts as entrepreneurs within a flexible labour market. Access to these jobs or contracts do provide an opportunity to address their immediate family needs and this should be considered a sporadic moment of emancipation that many have used in order to provide opportunities for their children. The fish processing industry is male-dominated and women are employed in casualised employment but the young women employed as engineering cadets are able to challenge not only patriarchal myths of women as ‘bad omens’ for the fishing catch, but also the notion that women are unable to learn technical skills.

The interviews reveal that women contest, collude and contradict the conventional view that paid employment increases the ability of women to negotiate and shift the boundaries towards equal gender relations. Because of the history of racial classification, the inequalities of race, class and

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gender intersect in order to illustrate how women make decisions within the constraints of poorly paid employment. Elements of a theory of marginalisation should include:

The nature of work in fish processing and the harsh conditions under which seasonal workers are employed is exacerbated by the temporary nature of their employment contracts.

The gender division of labour continues because traditionally men are the fishers and women support them in cleaning the catch and provide income to the household through their seasonal work as packers in the local fish processing factory.

Through lobbying, fisher organisations have gained an Equality Court ruling instructing the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism to issue interim relief fishing permits to traditional small-scale fishers while a comprehensive fishing policy for this sector is being finalised (Jaffer 2007). This community lobbying has brought the concerns of women fishers to the centre of the agenda for fishers’ rights.

Legislation on gender equality and the right to safety has influenced the women interviewed. Within the constraints of the given rules of the family, some of the women interviewed have opted to divorce their husbands in order to enhance their own emancipation and be economically and socially independent role models for their children. As single parents, the women have provided their children with opportunities for a better education and careers that were formerly unavailable to their mothers. If education is considered an asset, then the children will be able to use these as assets in order to leverage their engagement in the economy – jobs, business opportunities to produce future income (Gelb 2008:84).

Women fishers who have permits to harvest crayfish have the opportunity to become entrepreneurs, but require the fishing infrastructure in order to ensure their autonomy from outsourcing sections of the work process to the local fish processing factory. This would require access to funding which many women fishers have not been able to secure because they do not have the conventional collateral that banks require as guarantees for loans.

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Similar, to the case study on the construction industry, a hierarchy of employment contracts has developed amongst workers. The intersection of race and gender raises a number of different permutations of contractual employment relations. Those in the core are owners of SMMEs or permanent workers. The non-core or informal zone workers are those who have temporary contracts or casualised employment. During the interviews conducted with the women, I was reminded of Sunde’s (2008) words that through a process of systematically identifying the many roles that women fulfil in a fishing community and through stories about their grandmothers, mothers and their own work in their fishing household and villages, the women gradually painted a rich and detailed picture of the work women and girl children have done and continue to do today. This process of storytelling revealed the social, economic, political and spiritual value of marine resources to women. Most significantly, in order to highlight the particular values that women bring to fisheries are:

‘Those of nurturing, community-oriented and development perspective in which the links between all aspects of the fish supply chain are integrated.’

(Sunde and Isaacs 2008)

The multiple roles women perform in order to meet the consumption needs of their families, do not appear to increase equality within the household or workplace. The intersection of formal equality with the harsh realities of high levels of unemployment results in women taking poorly paid jobs as seasonal packers. In spite of preferential tendering or affirmative action within the workplace, the temporary and sporadic moments of emancipation that these insecure jobs provide for women, obfuscate the increasing levels of inequality. The increasing levels of inequality appeared amongst men and women but also amongst the women themselves as some were able to access more entrepreneurial forms of generating an income.

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CHAPTER 7: DEVELOPING A THEORY OF MARGINALISATION

7.1 Introduction

Targeting women in employment creation projects is positively encouraged by the active labour policies of the South African government on Development Corridors in the hope that the entry of women into these male-dominated jobs will alter job segregation. Instead, the rapid increase in women’s employment has feminised the labour market. In analysing the data from the two case studies, Miles and Huberman’s (l994) qualitative research method was implemented to develop themes and sub-themes from research data. In Chapters 5 on the construction industry and 6 on the fishing industry, the themes were discussed, followed by an analysis of each theme and sub-theme. The conclusions of Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 form the different elements of the theory on marginalisation. Therefore, the analysis based on the methodological approach is being formulated to create a theory. New themes were developed from research findings that did not conform to the themes linked to the questionnaire. For example, sub-themes (i) on new career options and (ii) alternate job creation for women in fishing and (iii) the reasons why women accept poorly paid short term contracts.

7.2 Matrix of Findings

A matrix was developed to assess and compare the different concepts of marginalisation, empowerment, emancipation, affirmative action, equality, social policy, etc. In developing the matrix it became obvious there were relationships between certain concepts. For example, what were the motives for accepting short-term contracts? Did women believe that short-term contracts would enhance their career prospectives? How did the concept of affirmative action relate to the variables of empowerment and emancipation? Did women believe that they would be able to alter the power relationship in the home if they were able to perform work considered the preserve of males? Would the benefits of earning an independent income shift the power relations within the home? The matrix below demonstrates these relationships.

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Relationships between concepts Emerging theme

Marginalisation: atypical employment, casual or daily work, non-standard employment, piece work, precarious insecure work

Labour market Casualised work, short term contracts

Empowerment: Self-confidence, assertiveness, positive self-image, freedom of association, better life choices, self-respect, conscientisation

Skills training Autonomy,challenging stereotypes and patriarchal attitudes

Emancipation: Franchise, vote, basic rights, human rights, democracy

Patriarchy

Freedom of choice. The right to safety and living without fear of gender-based violence

Affirmative action: Positive action, mentoring, Job satisfaction, fronting, tokenism, quotas, non-discrimination. Recognition of learning by doing.

Career development

Employment equity. Equality of outcomes in the workplace

Equality: Non-sexism, decision making, right to negotiate, access to knowledge, workplace rights and benefits

Power relations

Workplace democracy

Social policy: Democratising institutions, creating democratic laws, transforming societal values, Creating employment, addressing inequality, promote targeting of women in income generation projects

Labour-intensive work

Feminisation of work

In assessing whether women consider employment in male-dominated jobs as emancipatory, I utilised intersectionality as a methodology. According to Symington (2004), it requires that we focus on points of intersection, complexity, dynamic processes, and the structures that define our access to rights and opportunities. Because people are members of more than one community at any given moment, and can simultaneously experience oppression and privilege, intersectionality as a feminist methodology analyses how identities are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed for women performing male jobs and whether this is experienced as emanicipatory. Intersectionality of gender categories with racial classification provides an opportunity for concepts to be relational when seeking these as indicators towards equality. Symington notes how the conflicting and complex aspects of identity in women’s lives shift with each experience creating an opportunity for negotiation between each of the categories of identity. These negotiations carry the same risks and privileges because the interlocking systems of domination often impinge on the rights of poor and unemployed women who have very few alternatives (McCann and Kim 2003:150). Therefore, intersectionality of race, class, and gender as categories of analysis locates Black women as doubly burdened, subject to the dominating practices of both a sexual and a racial and class hierarchy (Crenshaw 1991). Furthermore, the concept of

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intersectional analysis provides a framework for feminist writers to use the dominant discourses of resistance thus reclaiming ‘victims’ by recognising social agency in order to theorise the experiences of Black women as central to feminist theory.

7.3 Intersectionality of Race, Class and Gender

In building a theory from the themes and sub-themes of the conceptual framework, the analysis of the findings will be used to formulate this theory of marginalisation. Women employed in short-term contracts face patriarchal attitudes of employers, financial institutions and workplace

colleagues78. The patriarchal nature of society tends to devalue the financial rewards of certain jobs once women excel in the sector and the wage rate is lower than those paid to their male counterparts. According to Elson (1997:156) production is a bearer of gender and that women’s reproductive labour is organised through gender-ascriptive relations that have become an economic practice.

These views are compounded by prejudice and patriarchal practices from male colleagues who believe women cannot perform jobs requiring strength because women’s role is one of reproduction. From the findings, women work twice as hard as their male counterparts in order to gain the respect of their colleagues. Contrary to evidence that women are successful as builders of homes in the informal and rural sectors, there is a belief that women are weaker and less

knowledgeable of the construction sector79. Similar sentiments were expressed by women SMME owners in fish processing, where men created myths about women’s role ‘was in the home’.80

These short-term contracts bring financial rewards but the financial independence is momentary because it meets the immediate needs of their families. The lack of financial freedom continues because they do not have an asset base which disadvantages women from expanding their enterprise. This lack of an asset base does not allow them to alter the power relationship in the

78 Interviewees reported a range of problems that they encountered while working in the construction and fish processing sector. Uppermost on the list is prejudice by the financial institutions to provide financial capital to women who do not have a conventional asset base.

79 These views were expressed by government representatives mandated to promote government policies that promote women in male-dominated jobs like construction.

80 Fishermen believed the myths that women should not gain employment as fisherpersons. These jobs are considered men’s work.

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industry nor are women able to challenge financial institutions. Therefore, intersections of race, class and gender in this post-apartheid period are used as indicators of equality and the primacy of gender equality over the other categories. The research reveals that should racial and gender discrimination be eradicated, it does not necessarily increase women’s social equality. This is because women’s access to contracts have differentiated and stratified society with those who have assets like FK being able to accumulate further wealth. BZ, a seasonal packer has the least opportunity to accumulate assets in the short term and will remain the most vulnerable to unemployment.

7.4 Building a Theory of Marginalisation

Findings reveal that women accept these poorly paid jobs because the remuneration brings immediate financial relief. Women accept poorly paid jobs because these are the only available jobs. Women feel empowered by their newly acquired skills. Women’s empowerment is linked to some measure of control over financial resources. However, the momentary sense of financial empowerment does not alter the power relations within the workplace nor the home. Empowerment is also linked to access to government tenders or being part of the mandatory percentage of jobs allocated to women. The opportunity to earn their own income encourages some women to leave abusive marriage relationships.

For better educated younger women, career opportunities as cadet engineers exist in certain industries. Once qualified, the young women will be able to challenge the male-dominated engineering profession.

Challenging Stereotypes Through Skills Training

For women in the construction case study (c.f. Chapter 5) these newly acquired skills are learnt ‘on the job’ or through short courses offered by local non-government organisations and universities. This knowledge transfer, together with many women’s childhood skills of kneading the mud in order to make bricks are components of skills enhancement of the construction industry. Women have begun to reconstruct the boundaries of the male domain by utilising the affirmative action policies to their own advantage. For women in the fish processing industry (c.f. Chapter 6) access to community and non-government organisations has raised their awareness of their right to equality. The burgeoning self-confidence and awareness of their rights to social

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and economic independence is fuelled by women’s formal equality guaranteed under the South African Constitution. By participating in programmes hosted by non-government organisations, the women interviewed have begun to challenge patriarchal stereotypes of the male breadwinner. While women are given opportunities to work, it is seasonal employment which is precarious and insecure. As members of women’s organisations, seasonal packers are being organised in order to lobby the local fish processing factory to improve their working conditions and highlight their plight as household heads with a right to a decent wage.

Women SMME owners have learnt new skills linked to male-dominated work. The experience of learning new skills and meeting women in similar circumstances shifts the feelings of empowerment towards a sense of emancipation. This is because the momentary sense of empowerment encourages women to use their social networks to meet women in similar situations but also to seek other contracts or enrol on training programmes offered by non-government organisations.

Short-term Contracts Create Spaces of Opportunity for Women

A second component of the theory is the financial rewards from short-term contracts that create moments of emancipation whereby women are enabled to meet their immediate household and family responsibilities. Also, the window of opportunity offered by government affirmative action policies has encouraged women to learn new skills of managing and operating a SMME. Government has created various mechanisms of protecting livelihoods or job creation including targeted employment on state projects or projects carried out with the assistance of government procurement policies. The flexibilisation of the labour market creates different permutations of contracts for women which are directly linked to their continued marginalisation within the industry. For women, this emancipatory moment alleviates them from the double burden of performing their reproductive role on a meagre income in order to pay for social services such as childcare and healthcare. These are services which should be borne by the state or the employer. The intersection of race, class and gender in the two case studies create work opportunities for women in a male-dominated industry, but whether they are able to shift the boundaries in order to incorporate women’s needs will not be measurable in the short term. Implicit in accepting these challenges is women’s agency which creates sporadic emancipatory moments, but which hopefully will lay the foundation for other women to build gender equality in the workplace. Therefore, the short-term contracts create opportunities for women in a male domain, but whether

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they are able to shift the boundaries in order to incorporate the needs of women will not be measurable in the short-term. As Kabeer (2000) notes that the experience of empowerment for women is the ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied them.

Women Forge Social and Financial Independence to Meet the Needs of Their Family

An additional component of the theory is that short-term contracts facilitate economic independence that meets consumption needs. Similar to women interviewed in the construction industry, the majority of women interviewed in fish processing depend largely on meeting consumption needs through income earned. Duffy and Pupo (l992) argue that these poorly-paid jobs with insecure employment contracts provide women workers with a sense of financial freedom and some leeway to negotiate the sexual division of labour in the home. This is a similar argument to that of Orloff (l993) who states that the limited financial freedom translates into some sense of social freedom. These opportunities, albeit constrained because of the flexible nature of the contract, demonstrate sporadic moments of emancipation, which the incumbents are able to utilise to their advantage in order to build a sustainable business. However, Duffy and Pupo (l992) remain critical of the part-time nature of work in the secondary labour market, as it tends to perpetuate women’s economic dependence on spouses and/or family, which by extension reinforces the patriarchal family relations. Therefore, the intersection of categories of discrimination – race and gender – indicate that women in casualised contracts both as workers or owners of SMMEs earn low incomes but these incomes are able to address the immediate needs of the household. An income for women provides an opportunity to meet her responsibilities within the family in terms of food, clothing and expenses like bus fare.

Reinforcing a Hierarchy of Workers

Similar to the construction industry, the various contractual relations in the fishing industry create a hierarchical structure for women in relation to the nature of the contract (Chen 2004, von Holdt and Webster 2005). These women entrepreneurs may be owners of SMMEs because for the duration of the contract they are able to manage, employ other women and make a profit from the contract. Between contracts they are employed as workers in other SMMEs or industries allied to fishing (c.f. Chapter 6). These women entrepreneurs may not be able to accumulate assets

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during the period of the sub-contract. The accumulation of an asset base is needed to alter their unequal position within the home. Thus, their roles in the fish processing industry switch between owners and workers depending on the nature of the work contract.

Women’s experience of self-empowerment and self-emancipation by learning new skills and owning SMMEs in a male-dominated industry strongly challenges male stereotypes. More importantly, the differentiation in strata of entrepreneurs who are able to create and sustain assets from profits earned through sub-contracts not only creates economic emancipation but also upward mobility and wealth creation for a small strata of women entrepreneurs in a society where wealth is no longer confined only to people classified as White.

Building Women’s Autonomy

Alternate forms of decision making are created through utilising the opportunities provided by the new dispensation of political emancipation. Therefore, women are not able to shift the decision-making power within the household because of the structures of collective constraint of that particular society/community. As Folbre (l994) notes that an attempt to capture the multiple inequalities and how they intersect to characterise social relationships give members a sense of identity and affiliation to the groups to which they belong. Therefore, the structures of collective constraint reflect inequalities of race or gender which characterise different societies, for instance, differences between women in construction from the women in fishing and particular matrices of domination in which the individual could occupy a subordinate position as a member of certain social groups (as a spouse without a steady income) but a dominant position in others (as a member of a women’s organisation). Women SMMEs owners in fish processing use their affiliation to women’s groups to network and learn new ideas. By not conforming to the rules associated with women’s traditional role within society, this small group of women entrepreneurs are challenging both women and men as they chip away at the job categories that separate women from extending themselves into the male sphere of work.

Women are involved in determining which choices to make and how to make optimal use of the opportunities for them and their families. While many of the household decisions are made within a patriarchal framework where a male opinion is considered more important, women’s ability to make financial contributions does give them authority to challenge male power.

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Women’s Ability to Create Social Networks of Support

These social networks highlight the significance of autonomy for women. According to Chhachhi and Pittin (l996:20) autonomy is both a process and strategy for women. These authors go further to note that autonomous social networks create the space for women where they can articulate their specific needs as well as develop skills of negotiation and leadership. Because women have short-term contracts to provide services at community level – building a road or crayfishing with other fishers – they are linked to a community of interests as well as members of their respective communities. These links are a form of social network that enables women to actively engage in matters affecting their livelihoods.

Women’s participation in networks linked to work similar to the ‘Women-in-Construction’ network creates an opportunity for women to build relationships and share information on how to engage in the next contract as partners or how to bid for a tender collaboratively. Working in a network is familiar for women learning skills of negotiation and knowledge of their rights as workers at the local non-governmental organisation. Thus, women over time will build solidarity networks to support each other and refrain from perceiving each other as competitors.

Access to Short-term Contracts Strengthens Women’s Agency

Black women’s ability to challenge patriarchal institutions such as transnational banks or White-owned construction companies pushes at the boundaries of discrimination that constrain them to the limitations of the given rules of society. Women indeed make voluntary choices within constraints of the type of work available at the time, location and income derived from this temporary, flexible contract because these sub-contracts appear to be the only method of entry into this male domain. Thus, this small group of women entrepreneurs not only challenge patriarchal stereotypes when seeking contracts by performing male jobs but, they also challenge the gender and racial bias of financial institutions and multinational construction companies that are managed by mainly White males.

Folbre’s (l994) idea of structures of collective constraints where the rules and resources give members a sense of identity and affiliation that are accepted within that group is a good example of the lack of choice. But, these inequalities or constraints are not preordained or fixed. Therefore, the theory of marginalisation challenges the ‘given’ configurations of race, class and gender in

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that it postulates that women working in Development Corridors are able to draw on the South African Constitution as the basis for their right to equality. In terms of the theory of marginalisation, women in these poorly-paid jobs exercise a choice, albeit within the constraints of high levels of unemployment. These moments of emancipation provide women with opportunities or alternate forms of generating an income.

7.5 Conclusion

Research findings are similar to those about Black working women employed in apartheid-constructed border industries or in Bantustans who were afflicted by the gendered quality of the jobs and the level of technology utilised. Hart (2004) established that employment in the decentralised areas had been created in industries with primitive working conditions, reports of sexual harassment and a 30% wage differential compared with metropolitan jobs. Work intensification coupled with the absence of social welfare benefits doubled the burden of women working in these factories. The high levels of inequality between women living in former Bantustans and women living in urban areas still exist. Therefore, the introduction of the flexible labour market together with its hidden costs, especially the lack of work-related benefits, through the new Development Corridors pose serious challenges for the quest for gender equality in South Africa, especially in the workplace. However, the marginalisation of women working in the border industries and Bantustans and the negative aspects of poorly-paid work was counter posed by benefits for women who were able to maintain closer family links and independent economic lives. Hart (2004) contends that the development was a double-edged sword for women. On the one hand, it provided employment opportunities where no alternatives existed. On the other hand, women worked for pitiful wages in exploitative work conditions. Furthermore, employment opportunities were at the expense of women working in the metropolitan areas.

In developing the theory of marginalisation, I weighed up the opportunities and disadvantages of being employed in casualised, temporary employment or holding a short-term contract as a SMME owner and whether this form of employment furthers women’s emancipation and promotes equality between men and women. This approach reveals many contradictory elements because, due to the short-term nature of contracts, women have sporadic moments of emancipatory experiences. As noted, short-term contracts or temporary work may increase women’s participation in decision making, create more active and visible presence in the

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community and create networks with other women in similar positions. These networks are experienced as moments of emancipation. Emancipation, albeit temporary, has encouraged women to live free of abusive relationships which enhance the quality of their lives and their capacity to make decisions according to their own needs and desires. The theory of marginalisation is particularly relevant to women because it raises the question of how the women in temporary, casual employment qualify the choices they make when accepting the lowly-paid job. When making the decision to accept the temporary contract, it is important to establish whether gender was the only basis on which inequality existed or whether there were other covert constraints. Therefore, it is important to take into account the evidence of other forms of social inequalities, for instance lack of income from a spouse. The importance of the theory of marginalisation for this study is to try to deconstruct the working lives of the women I interviewed in order to try to understand why they accepted a job that would not provide workplace benefits accrued to permanent workers. The theory also posits a positive outcome of empowerment for women that could bring change through engagement with social policy.

However, none of the emanicipatory processes can be maintained over an extended period because flexibilised, casualised contracts are short term and poorly paid. Therefore, the negative elements of flexible employment appear to weigh heavily against women’s productive and reproductive roles because it excludes them from more long-term social or economic emancipation. Real social or economic emancipation includes the ability to make decisions that affect their own lives and that of their families. Intersectionality is a useful strategy for linking the grounds of discrimination (e.g. race, gender, etc.) to the social, economic, political and legal environment that contributes to discrimination and experiences of oppression and privilege. As Symington (2004) notes the rich descriptions produced through intersectional analysis illuminate the actors, institutions, policies and norms that intertwine to create a given situation.

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CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION – THE PARADOX OF CHOICE

‘Women and men can organise our world and our lives to meet basic needs, to ensure work of dignity and to enable each girl and each boy to develop to their full creative human potential.’

(Govender 2008:180)

8.1 Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to draw together all the different debates on Black women who are employed in flexible employment or who manage flexible contracts as SMME owners in the essentially male-dominated industries of construction and fishing. Encouraging women to establish SMMEs as job creation is part of the post-apartheid active labour policy. The rapid entry of women into the labour market is supported by empirical evidence that employment patterns and the sexual division of labour in developing economies are feminine as well as export-led (Pearson l998:l75). Rapid industrialisation often relied on the international division of labour between the developed and developing worlds that attracted young single or childless women mainly from rural areas. Women unfettered by family responsibilities were considered the most employable. As industrialisation expanded, urban women who were better educated than their rural counterparts were employed in export factories (Pearson 1998). In South Africa, the democratisation process encouraged women to enter the segregated job market in industries considered a male domain in a bid to remove gender discrimination in the workplace.

This study identified the Maputo Development Corridor, especially the N4 Toll Road and the West Coast Investment Initiative as the two research sites to interview women employed in male-dominated sectors. Post-apartheid legislation dismantled all forms of racial discrimination and replaced it with a battery of non-racial and non-sexist legislation which encouraged equal opportunities for women and men. An important reminder is that SMME and public works programmes are part of the active labour market strategy to address the high levels of unemployment. As shown in Chapter 2, social policies promoting SMMEs as part of active labour markets to address unemployment have become a popular vehicle to generate an income outside

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of the formal workplace. This combined with affirmative action programmes encourages all institutions to promote previously disadvantaged individuals (PDIs)81 into management positions formerly held by Whites. The research therefore sought to investigate the nature of employment for Black women, and addressed the following questions:

(i) Whether flexible contracts will promote equality between men and women in the workplace?

(ii) Whether flexible employment contracts contribute to Black women’s emancipation?

The methodology developed using Miles and Huberman’s (1994) matrix of analysis confirms that in this period of globalisation, the majority of work opportunities available are flexible, temporary, contractual employment or sub-contracting. Therefore, the case studies of the construction (Chapter 5) and fishing (Chapter 6) industries illustrate that women on flexible contracts or sub-contracts enter into these arrangements because these are often the only work opportunities available to them. The earlier analysis by Pearson and Elson in the l980s, which indicated that women’s subordination could be intensified, decomposed or recomposed by the construction of a new nimble-fingered female labour force is often sidelined as particular case studies or standpoints provide contrasting evidence and frequently elevate to general conclusions that women find flexible short-term contracts emancipatory (Pearson and Elson 1998, Pearson 2007:205). The interviews of women in construction and fishing production in this study serve to offer more specific evidence to buttress this argument.

In the research process, I identified or established that the concepts of emancipation and equality could be used as indicators, in order to assess whether women have been able to ensure substantive equality which ensures rights beyond formal equality before the law as stipulated in the South African Constitution and the Bill of Rights. While women are formally emancipated from all forms of discrimination, I pursued and unpacked the concepts through the interview process in order to assess whether this formal equality has been transformed into substantive equality through women’s engagement with contracts that are flexible, insecure and short-term. Data from

81 These are women classified as White, Black, Coloured as well as Indian and Black men who have been endorsed by means of government legislation to enter employment or income generation opportunities formerly unavailable to them.

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the two case studies indicate that short-term contracts empower women to earn an income to meet their immediate consumption needs. Women also learn new job-related skills and those of social networking.

8.2 The Research Findings

Research findings of this project are summarised to illustrate that access to opportunities affects women differently depending on their racial and class backgrounds. The high levels of inequality between women living in former Bantustans where many of the SDIs are located and women living in urban areas still exist. Therefore, the introduction of the flexible labour market together with its hidden costs, especially the lack of work-related benefits, through the new Development Corridors pose serious challenges for the quest for gender equality in South Africa especially in the workplace. Data on the two case studies reveal that women accept these opportunities with the knowledge that it may only provide immediate financial relief to address their responsibilities within the family. Social theorists like Evans (2003:67) assume that entry into paid work is in itself emancipatory for women. This view concurs with the Engelian myth that paid work emancipates women. But, this viewpoint is disputed by Elson who notes precarious or temporary work does not necessarily emancipate women for a number of reasons (ibid). First, the research posits that women in casualised employment do not necessarily benefit from lowly-paid employment because the income may alter the entitlements linked to the organisation of the family because these entitlements may change when women take on paid work. Second, formal entitlements such as family budgets or informal entitlements such as childcare arrangements which formerly may have been reciprocal may alter when women take paid employment. Without recognising women’s childbearing role, employers disadvantage women by not investing in their career development similar to their male counterparts even when women demonstrate the ability to learn skills considered the domain of men. Nor do employers consider women’s reproductive needs for workplace childcare facilities. Consequently, paid work may not be emanicipatory for women, if women’s reproductive roles are not acknowledged because their respective financial contributions towards the household budget may alter the informal family rules and entitlements but may not guarantee greater access to decision making within the family.

Duffy and Pupo (l992) argue that these poorly-paid jobs with insecure employment contracts provide women workers with a sense of financial freedom and some leeway to negotiate the

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sexual division of labour in the home. This is a similar argument to that of Orloff (l993) who states that the limited financial freedom translates into some sense of social freedom. Thus, assessing the outcomes of entering flexible contracts is ultimately a process of gauging how race, class and gender intersect to create opportunities for women. The sense of financial independence is empowering for women who believe that they have some control over their lives. Therefore, this chapter theorises the evidence under the headings used to describe the findings of each case study in Chapters 5 and 6 as follows:

8.2.1 Labour-Intensive Unskilled Work Promoted as Female-Dominated Employment

This is an aspect of government policy on active labour markets and affirmative action which promote women in male-dominated industries and is an opportunity for women to gain access to job creation and skills development. Presently, women’s engagement in public works programmes (SCC is one such organisation) is a vehicle with which to challenge male stereotypes in order to construct sustainable community assets such as roads as transport links for communities to places of work, schools and clinics. For women, employed as casual workers on these projects, the work is categorised as unskilled and poorly paid with no long-term prospects of renewal. The industry is skills-driven: women work laying reflective cats’ eyes on the road, laying the kerbstones, sweeping the road, flagging down the traffic, mixing the cement and stone, scaffolding, brick-laying, plastering, welding and slinging. An important fact must not be overlooked, that is the secondary aspect of skills development in the construction industry. Women employed on these job contracts have learnt to perform new tasks through ‘learning by doing’ or by attending short courses which teach them to lay bricks, mix cement and apply plaster on walls (Interview female Group interview women in allied industry August l999). These opportunities can flourish if women are aware that the new skill is a stepping stone towards better work opportunities in a longer employment contract.

FH, an African woman who owns the construction SMME, experienced labour-intensive jobs as emancipatory. She considers skills acquisition as a stepping stone to learning further skills in the industry. While the employees of the SMME have temporary employment contracts for the duration of the supplier contract, these local inhabitants are trained to perform the many tasks linked to the supplier contract. This is considered a vehicle for empowering historically disadvantaged communities (African, Coloured and Indian) by generating employment utilising

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workers from the local community as part of government’s strategy to alleviate poverty by creating jobs, even if they are poorly paid and temporary. Therefore, feminisation of this industry is confined to the lower echelons of the job market which requires little skill and knowledge of construction. However, female members of the local community do not benefit in the longer term because they are unemployed once the contract is completed. While labour-based construction is labour-intensive there is also the myth held by employers and male workers that women are suited to work at repetitive and lowly-skilled tasks that coincide with the lower echelons of the construction job market.

A similar scenario exists in the fish production industry where Coloured women seasonal workers are employed mainly in the nearby fish processing factory. They work long hours under extremely harsh, icy conditions and suffer chronic health problems without health insurance. Because women work long hours, the older children, mainly the girls, are forced to leave school at an early age to care for their siblings (Interview, JZ, female, seasonal packer, wife of OR, April 2003). Seasonal workers are employed for short periods and the discrimination in wages and working conditions for seasonal workers and workers in standard employment creates a hierarchy amongst workers. This division is exacerbated by the lack of social security for contract seasonal workers who are non-core workers or 3rd tier workers as described by von Holdt and Webster (2005). Women seasonal workers remain marginalised from permanent employment and while the low wages contribute towards immediate consumption needs; this form of employment is not experienced as emancipatory. As the main employer of women workers in the local area, the fish processing company is able to determine the nature of the contract and women find themselves at the end of a global supply chain and unable to empower themselves with security through full-time employment. It is also able to exclude women fishers from their cohort of personnel who are employed on the trawlers. Therefore women in construction and fishing remain marginalised from permanent forms of employment and therefore do not enjoy equal workplace rights with their male counterparts. In the short term women will not be able to shift the boundaries of this male-dominated industry because the majority of women need to be convinced that they are able to perform these jobs and learn the skills of managing large construction projects. In the longer term the success of this small group of women in construction as role models will build a critical mass and may be able to shift the perceptions towards enhancing women’s emancipatory roles within male-dominated jobs, thereby creating an opportunity for gender equality in the industry.

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8.2.2 Do Short-term Contracts Enhance Women’s Social Emancipation?

FH and her colleagues symbolise this new category of women construction operator/owner and entrepreneurs. Her dream is to become a civil engineer, thus challenging the masculinist bias within this profession. Due to the labour-intensive nature of road construction, it appears to be flexible enough to include both women’s existing skills and newly acquired skills. FH’s experience demythologises the notion that women cannot perform jobs requiring strength and stamina. She has also proven that she is able to work the long hours of construction work, in addition to having the capacity to manage the SMME. FH and her colleagues in the construction industry consider labour-intensive employment as a stepping stone towards more sustainable employment because they are learning skills that may enhance their opportunities as they gain more experience in the industry. Thus, flexibilisation in this context is not always detrimental to workers, especially women, despite the short-term nature of the contract. However, the ability to break out of the conundrum of short-term contracts into a more sustainable and viable business is the challenge facing emerging sub-contractors like SCC. For example, the ability to build financial capital in order to expand their skills base by hiring permanent staff with complementary skills like quantity surveying continues to be a challenge.

As more and more women enter the industry as workers, managers and directors of small enterprises, their contributions should be acknowledged and celebrated. Since l994, these women have used their right to equality as determined by the South African Constitution and the Bill of Rights in order to bolster their social and political capacity. They have also enhanced their capacity for self-organisation. Many of the women interviewed have membership to the South African Chapter of Women in Construction, which is affiliated to a US-based organisation. At a conference of the South African chapter, I spoke to many women who were refurbishing (painting, renovating or repairing) the infrastructure of schools or roads in their townships. Chhachhi and Pittin (l996) demonstrate that women’s emancipation encourages them to embrace a range of innovative and effective organisational strategies which take up issues of wages, working conditions, health and safety, sexual harassment, workplace and domestic violence, reproductive rights, civil and political participation, consumer issues and education and training.

Women’s participation in the economy increases women’s economic contribution and makes them more visible. The right to equality as stipulated in the South African Constitution provides a

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different kind of gendered experience, offering the possibility of alternative versions of gender roles and expectations. Consequently, the few women in construction and allied industries have used the economic opportunity, albeit temporary or short-term to build their confidence in order to shift the consciousness of women and men opposed to their participation in a male-dominated industry. Their networking and meeting with women in similar life situations encourages their collective action in income-generating projects, credit schemes for small businesses or collective action around health or environmental issues. This consequently provides women the tools to remould the conditions of their livelihoods rather than reacting to pre-existing structures (Pearson l998:183).

Similar to women in the construction industry, women in the fishing industry have membership of women’s organisations, and their experiences of building these organisations have assisted them to emancipate themselves from male domination in their homes. NH’s knowledge of government’s active labour market to encourage women to establish SMMEs has facilitated her stride towards economic independence. By following government legislation, company procurement policies offered women on the West Coast opportunities to tender for catering or cleaning services and she has been able to encourage women to push at male-dominated boundaries in the fish processing industry. NH’s entrepreneurial approach to establishing a non-governmental training organisation in order to train young people and women in non-traditional jobs had the impact of altering the gender dynamic in certain male-dominated jobs and breaking stereotypes. This approach to autonomy is echoed by FK, the female boat owner, who states that she is confident to go out fishing in her own boat. She concurs that women can now exercise the choice to own a boat and she employs fisherpersons to work on her boat. The right to fishing licences and quotas are all achievements of the women’s-only organisation, which lobbied for the Minister of Transport to facilitate the career development of small boat fishers.

Women have learnt how to utilise the few opportunities open to them to their own advantage. FK, as the chairperson of the local fishing association, is able to build the social networks of women keen to enter fishing as a livelihood either as fishers or boat owners. NH’s membership of the local political organisation creates opportunities to network with funders keen to empower women to learn skills allied to fishing. Many of the skills acquired encourage women’s emancipation to earn an income independent of their spouses. Both FK and FH are children of working class

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families who have used their knowledge of fish production to their own advantage to build gender equality amongst women keen to learn these skills.

8.2.3 Do Women’s New Workplace Roles Shift the Decision-making Process in the Home?

Women employed at certain professional levels of the construction sector fear their appointments represent tokenism since their professional integrity has often been questioned by their male counterparts. Mainly White males dominate engineering companies. These White men find women entering a male domain as diluting the profession and dropping standards. However, women working at community level, painting schools or refurbishing roads in the local area have proven themselves to be highly capable. The result is that men have increasing levels of respect for their female counterparts and work harder to protect their jobs (Interview with female focus Group, August 1999). Although government policies may facilitate the empowerment of women it appears as if multinational companies owned by White males with mainly male employees fail to recognise women’s right to equality in certain job categories. Increasingly though, Black working class women are becoming aware of methods to improve their access to male-dominated jobs. These Black women want to take advantage of new opportunities to learn new skills and consequently be role models for their children who did not have the burden of living during apartheid’s job reservation. In the interview with women in jobs allied to construction, I was informed that they took these short contracts in order to learn new skills of managing projects (Interview, female Group interview, August 1999).

Literature on women’s participation in the labour market indicates that institutions are constructed on the assumption that women employees are secondary earners who are able to draw on the earnings and assets of the men within their household. In fact, women’s entry into paid employment could involve additional costs of transport, clothing, accommodation and childcare. As a result, women entering employment previously reserved for men will not have the necessary workplace support systems of crèches or health care facilities. Even if significant costs of participation are not involved, women may find that once they are earning their own income, there is an offsetting reduction in income transfers from non-market sources, especially from the fathers of their children (Elson l999:615). Sub-contractors are dependent on payment from the contractor. When delays occur, the contractor is not responsible for the high interest rates charged to sub-contractors for late loan repayments. These financial obstacles hamper financial planning within

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the household and family, which disadvantages women with family responsibilities from taking contracts without the collateral funding (Interview, female Group interview, August 1999).

Black entrepreneurs, especially women, operate in a very competitive business climate. As Rogerson (l999) argues, because of their vulnerable financial position and the small-scale nature of their enterprise, they face unfair competition from big companies and the predatory practice of larger enterprises for downward plundering of contract pricing. Thus, women entrepreneurs or small contractors in the construction sector interviewed have been unable to ensure financial viability and therefore are unable to make choices which enhance the livelihoods of their families. Because working class women like FH do not have an asset base, which cushions her during periods between contracts or when payments are late, her decision-making power within the family is weak. While she acknowledges the fact that her husband supports her decision to own a SMME, the long waiting periods between contracts must surely place a strain on family relationships or budget planning. A similar pattern could be assumed for the women working in allied industries. While the majority of the women interviewed were single mothers, the shifting roles between entrepreneurs, own account operator and worker within a construction company affect these women’s ability to alter the boundaries of decision making within their households. Nevertheless, women’s economic contribution has become visible and recognised because women play an important and vital role within the household. Women interviewed relied on their families to assist with loans in establishing their SMMEs. According to FH, her husband supported her in the setting up of the SMME. However, the women entrepreneurs in allied industries were not as fortunate because they relied on funds from Stokvels and these savings would not be enough to make long-term decisions affecting the household. Therefore, women’s social emancipation may not be enough to shift decision making within the home.

In the fishing industry women enter male-dominated employment at the bottom of the ladder in terms of skills and wage levels. Women do not benefit from the opportunities in fishing because the traditional male small fishers are overtly opposed to women being part of the fishing crew. Male fishers interviewed believe women should continue to mend the nets or perform auxiliary tasks of collecting mussels from rocks or cleaning the fish as their role in fish production (Field notes, April 2003). Women’s lack of economic muscle, compounded by the attitudes of their male spouses, keeps them in marginalised positions in the home. According to FK, the boat owner, men believe that women do not have the physical strength to perform the tasks associated with

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fishing or the manual work on a fishing trawler. This viewpoint is shared by men in the construction industry.

The myths created by male fishers and employers have become a reality because male viewpoints have become part of the recruitment policies of large multinational companies. The interviews reveal that in response to the gender neutral policies of multinational companies, women have created an alternate form of income generation through sewing projects to ensure an income for women living in Paternoster. Skills of sewing, knitting and cleaning are associated with woman-like traits and conform to the views of male fishers regarding women’s roles within the home. Notwithstanding these factors, the attempts to break the stereotypes and demythologise the negative influence women are presumed to have in these two male domains are indications that women plan to enter the workplace as equals. In addition, should this not occur, women are learning skills of entrepreneurship that will assist them to ensure an income that is not dependent on seasonal work but will create new opportunities for women to negotiate as equals in the home.

Women’s emancipation from patriarchal marriages and abusive relationships is facilitated by awareness programmes hosted by local non-government organisations. These community-based programmes support and highlight the emancipation of both men and women from racial oppression. The proliferation in the media regarding rights and issues of equality is part of the new dispensation to which the majority of South Africans have access. Thus, the right to equality in every sphere of one’s life permeates all forms of media, the schools, the church, and so on. These different forms of community networks encourage women to embrace different aspects of equality both within the home and the workplace. Legislation empowering women may change their consciousness of how they perceive the world but women’s agency will determine whether they use their formal rights of equality to build more egalitarian relationships in the home. The majority of women’s accounts of their lives indicate an awareness of legal, formal and substantive equality. Due to the short-term nature of the work contracts, it may not be possible for women to alter the decision-making power within the home. However, as mothers they take on these insecure contracts in order that their children may benefit.

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8.2.4 Do Flexible Contracts Encourage Women to Make Choices Within Constraints?

Folbre (l994) captures the multiple and intersecting inequalities which characterise social relationships in different societies through the idea of structures of collective constraints. This is described in Chapter 3, as the constraints confronting women related to asset distribution, political rules, cultural norms and individual preferences which combine to assign individuals to different social groupings within a society. According to Folbre, the structures of collective constraint are hierarchical and an individual may occupy a subordinate position of one particular group but a dominant position in another. Therefore, when women recall the principles of equality of the South African Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which together promote the elimination of discrimination based on race and gender as the source of their right to equality, this does not necessarily reflect an access to equal opportunity in the workplace. Furthermore government legislation which provides preferential treatment for women in the workplace does not necessarily begin to address the high levels of unemployment. Sixteen years into democracy the levels of inequality are higher than they were when the majority of South Africans cast their vote for the first time.

The research indicates that not all the women interviewed benefited from affirmative action in the workplace, and even those who have, do not have sustainable jobs or long-term sub-contracts. While these women may break the cycle of poverty by accepting these insecure contracts in formerly male jobs, they may not be able to emancipate themselves from inequality because they cannot compete for similar jobs as equals to their male counterparts. These working class women have access to short-term contracts either as workers or contractors and accept these contracts because they aspire for better lives for themselves and for their children. The aspiration is that decent work with full workplace benefits and security would protect them and their children from poverty. Therefore, women in temporary contracts conform to a particular set of rules by accepting jobs that promote Black women. Furthermore, breaking the boundaries of male domination and overcoming these challenges are no guarantees of further work opportunities or an opportunity to break out of poverty.

On the other hand, non-government organisations offering empowerment programmes targeting seasonal female fishers break the given rules of that particular community by encouraging women to know their rights within society. The participants learn to develop the self-confidence

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necessary to address their roles as mothers of children living in a violent community and as equal partners within the homes. The increasing awareness of alternatives to their current work and home conditions encourages the development of a self-emancipation for women which allows them to realise that a different worldview is possible. Various examples of this can be found in the two case studies. Firstly, in the case study on construction, FH has attended a number of different programmes on the skills of construction and the management of projects. Her aspiration is to become an engineer (Interview, FH, female, SMME owner, August 1999). She is of the opinion that a battery of short courses combined with some university programmes will qualify her as a construction engineer. As a construction engineer she would have a myriad of career options available including the ability to tender for contracts in her individual capacity as an owner of a SMME or to hire her skills to other construction companies as a professional engineer. Secondly, FK as a boat-owner employs or hires a space on the boat to other fishers. The various options available to FK facilitate her ability to accumulate wealth from her fishing business. Her business acumen together with her status as chairperson of the national fishers association places her in a good position to become familiar with the current fishing legislation and therefore to be able to negotiate a larger fishing quota. Thirdly, NH as a role model for other women has demonstrated that knowledge of legislation favouring women does empower her to access some of the available opportunities linked to preferential tendering.

Micro-enterprises such as Spaza shops for self-employment exist as survivalist organisations. Notwithstanding the limitations placed on micro-enterprises, women owners consider this an empowering process because they are able to be agents in their own development determining which choices to make for their families. Despite the constraints women face when they make choices to take poorly-paid flexible jobs, they do so with the knowledge that they may be able to change the life options for their children. NH’s children have benefited from her hard work. Two of her four children have professional careers. Her third child is a university student.

According to Bourdieu:

‘The aspirations of the women are mediated through (i) their objective chances depending on the volume and composition of capital reproduced and (2) on the state of the instruments of reproduction.’

(Bourdieu cited in Jenkins l992:140)

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These aspirations may include inheritance law and custom, labour market and the educational system. Whether the women’s aspirations are fulfilled depends on their relationship to the production process and their ability to negotiate the relationship of power. In other words, NH’s children will benefit from her ability to negotiate sustainable contracts. In doing so she is able to ensure the financial resources or economic opportunities necessary for better life chances to enter professional careers which are roles reproduced through the educational system. The process of empowerment is a positive outcome for the next generation who live in an environment that is democratising.

8.3 Symbolic Capital as a Path towards Breaking the Mould of Marginalisation

‘…the ideas for the struggles for recognition are a fundamental dimension of social life and that what is at stake in them is an accumulation of a particular form of capital, honour in the sense of reputation and prestige, and that there is, therefore a specific logic behind the accumulation of symbolic capital…’

Bourdieu (cited in Jenkins l992: 129)

The women interviewed expressed this struggle for recognition in the sharing of the work/life experience by their families and the community. The recognition of their contribution towards the economy, society and their respective families could be regarded as the accumulation of symbolic capital that would benefit their children. Accepting poorly-paid flexible employment can be interpreted as an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of democracy which has been significantly represented by preferential tendering for the female owners of SMMEs. The engagement of female owners of SMMEs with the tendering process or the acceptance of an affirmative action post as a cadet engineer have the potential to enhance the reputation and prestige of the awardees of the tender or the successful professional engineer. The accumulation of symbolic capital rewards the individual with an achievement of self-empowerment necessary to break into a career that was formerly only available to males. This form of symbolic capital has been achieved by FK, the boat owner, who not only has accumulated sufficient capital to employ staff, but who also has the reputation of achievement as the chairperson of the national fishing association.

Conversely, the female seasonal packer and the domestic worker trained as a fisher can only aspire to accumulating symbolic capital because they do not have financial independence. The

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women who participate in the awareness programmes offered by the local non-government organisation realise that building self-confidence regarding the rights of women to equality is a stepping stone towards accumulating a different form of symbolic capital – the respect of their children, spouses and community to protect and defend their rights to decent work and personal security. Notwithstanding the process of self-empowerment, this does not automatically lead to economic equality. Rather, it addresses some of the injustices of the apartheid policies (Michaels 2006). The research findings reveal different interpretations of symbolic capital for the different categories of women. FH has earned a reputation of prestige and respect as a boat owner and by holding the highest office of the national fishing association. FK and NH are in the process of accumulating symbolic capital as contract entrepreneurs. The female SMME owners enjoy differentiated measures of emancipation because they have empowered themselves through access to and knowledge of government legislation. B, the engineering cadet, has followed a different path of symbolic capital towards a career as a professional engineer. The seasonal packer and domestic worker’s awareness of their rights to equality in the workplace and home is empowering for themselves, their children and community.

8.4 Breaking the Bonds of Marginalisation

As stated in Chapter 3, feminists of all political persuasions concur that industrialisation encouraged a rapid increase in female employment. Based on the knowledge that globalisation has created short-term contracts for Black women, this section examines three possibilities for breaking the bonds of marginalisation for women and men in the informal sector.

8.4.1 Is Flexible Employment Able to Promote Emancipation towards Substantive Equality?

According to Moser (l993:23), in order to understand the division of labour which subordinates women in low income developing world households, there is a need to explain women’s triple role – namely the reproductive, productive and community managing role. Once this concept is understood, policy makers should provide a gender analysis of practical and strategic gender needs. Strategic gender needs are the needs women identify because of their subordinate position to men in their society. Molyneux (2003:234) suggests that each context has different strategic needs which relate to gendered visions of labour, power and control and may include

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issues such as legal rights, domestic violence, equal wages and women’s control over their bodies. Meeting these needs ultimately helps women to achieve greater equality.

As Molyneux states, strategic needs include:

‘The abolition of the sexual division of labour, the alleviation of the burden of domestic labour and childcare; the removal of institutionalised forms of discrimination such as rights to own land or property; or access to credit; the establishment of political equality; freedom of choice over childbearing; and the adoption measures against male violence and control over women.’

(Molyneux 2003:234)

Practical gender needs, in contrast, are those formulated from conditions women experience in their daily lives. These are based on their position within the gendered division of labour in addition to their practical gender interests for human survival.

These include:

‘The needs women identify in their socially accepted roles in society. Practical gender needs to not challenge the gendered divisions of labour or women’s subordinate position in society, although rising out of them. Practical gender needs are a reason for immediate perceived necessity, identified within a specific context. They are practical in nature and often are concerned with inadequacies in living conditions such as water provision, health care and employment.’

(Molyneux 2003:234)

When comparing the outcome of the indicators of equality it becomes clear that women have gained skills training and access to the building of social networks in order to share information on prospective jobs or tenders. When examining the prospect of achieving emancipation, it becomes clear that the goals of social independence and the increase or improvement of the life chances of their children have indeed been achieved. However, the relationship between progressive social policy and government investment in infrastructure, particularly in the sectors of water, transportation, communications and energy would boost women’s chances of building on the few social gains they have made. Without the appropriate supporting policies and mechanisms, women remain exploited even if paid employment appears to have empowered them in different aspects of their lives.

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8.4.2 Towards Decent Work for Marginalised Women Workers

As Chant and Pedwell (2008:3) state, work within the economy as a whole is conceived as being dispersed along an ‘informal-formal’ continuum in which greater degrees of formality tend to indicate more effective regulation and greater access to rights, social protection and collective bargaining power. The authors view the ILO’s overarching objective for decent work as a recognition that flexible contracts do not meet the requirements and that their endeavour is to find mechanisms that shift greater numbers of workers towards the formal end of the continuum which is decent work.

Lund and Srinivas (2000) develop this conceptual framework further, portraying the informal-formal continuum as:

‘A cable containing different strands – with each strand being a sector, such as textiles, services and construction. For these authors this conceptualisation allows ‘commodity chains, and the chains of ownership and supply and distribution’, as well as the links between them, to come ‘clearly in view’.’

(Lund and Srinivas 2000)

The research indicates that respondents – seasonal packers and SMME owners, are at the end of the continuum of informality with no workplace protection or benefits. The increase in the informalisation of work creates further inequality between men and women but also amongst women themselves. Furthermore, it is revealed that women are empowered to meet their immediate consumption and family needs. In order to address issues of marginalisation, the relationship between employers or principle contract holders and workers or SMME owners will have to be altered in order to recognise the rights of women to decent work82 which obliterate the sporadic moments of emancipation that flexible employment contracts provide. Typically, the positive effects of increased income are offset by reproductive costs of childcare along with increased household workloads and time poverty.

82 Decent work constitutes four key pillars: employment opportunities, rights, protection and voice. Decent work is captured in four strategic objectives: fundamental principles and rights at work and international labour standards; employment and income opportunities; social protection and social security; and social dialogue and Tripartism. These objectives hold for all workers, women and men, in both formal and informal economies; in wage employment or working on their own account; in the fields, factories and offices; in their home or in the community.http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/ Mainpillars/WhatisDecentWork/lang--en/index.htm. Accessed 19 June 2009.

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Therefore, decent work principles for the women interviewed would focus on work/life balance as a priority towards gender equality. Further research to enhance women’s quest towards decent work (as employers and employees) should be conducted on Active Labour Market policies that include:

(i) Government guaranteeing employment for women for at least 150 days a year at a decent wage. The workplace must have facilities or be close to amenities that cater for women’s reproductive role.

(ii) Government provides conditional grants to workers for skills training or upgrading of work-based skills linked to community needs so that workers from local communities are able to ensure sustainable incomes.

8.5 Conclusion

South African social policies promoting women in formerly male-dominated jobs have met their intentions by breaking down stereotypes that prevent women from entering jobs considered male. Dismantling these stereotypes perform an important aspect in the development of a non-racial and non-sexist society. Government departments and large multinational companies have begun to employ women in jobs formerly designated for men. There have been advantages and disadvantages for women in male-dominated employment. Rather than reconstructing the job descriptions, employers have encouraged women’s entry into the workplace built on pre-existing inequalities between men and women and gender norms in the sexual division of labour. As evidence in fishing and construction case studies indicate, women have less skilled jobs and lower wages than men, and work in unhealthy and exploitative conditions. For those who have broken the glass ceiling, there has been access to start-up capital to establish SMMEs. For others, it is the conundrum of being stuck in piece or seasonal work without adequate financial rewards.

The research revealed that women in seasonal employment are of the lowest importance in the commodity chain because they have the least bargaining power in the workplace. For the SMME owner, the research indicates that the commodity chains of ownership, supply and distribution are tenuous and often hidden because each contract has different requirements, often forcing the owner to lower margins of profits and consequently keeping wage levels to the legal minimum. In

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this study, it appears as if the young engineering cadets have the opportunity to enter professions considered male. As this research reveals, an important aspect of government policy on active labour market policies has been to promote SMMEs amongst previously disadvantaged communities. These contracts for the majority of women workers or SMME owners are temporary, casual and short term. Women SMME owners face many covert discriminatory practices by financial institutions and certifying bodies who refuse to implement the new reforms. Therefore, the active labour market policies have not realised its intention of creating a group of women enterprise owners who create employment through engaging in public works programmes on a sustainable basis.

However, women use short-term contracts as opportunities to learn new skills and to build social networks and solidarity organisations for sharing information on future contracts. The social networks break the isolation and alienation of temporary and casual contracts. Therefore, women use the opportunity for self-empowerment with the knowledge that these short-term contracts may be vehicles for more long-term opportunities, thus breaking the mould of marginalisation towards building substantive equality.

In conclusion, social policies that pursue gender equality should adopt a more coherent approach that acknowledges both women’s productive and social reproductive role, thus ensuring benefits reach the women who need it most. While women have gained formal equality with a space to push at the gender stereotypes which challenge patriarchy both within the productive and reproductive sphere, more attention should be paid to gender segmentation in labour markets and to a gender-specific value chain analysis. In particular there is a need to understand the root causes underlying gender segmentation in trade activities, especially the intra-household dynamics in relation to women’s labour and their willingness to work for low wages and returns to labour (Randriamaro 2008:12). An acknowledgement of the missing link between policy and implementation is vital for upward mobility beyond survival towards economic empowerment for the majority of women.

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APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW SCHEDULE FOR CASE STUDIES

Interview schedule

The research tool which has been adopted is an open-ended in-depth qualitative questionnaire that uses guided questions rather than quantitative survey methods. The choice of a qualitative method is so as to measure change in an attempt to assess the integration of women into the development process/workplace. The qualitative guide included the following questions:

Female and male workers

What motivated you to apply for your current job?

How did you acquire the skills to perform a job dominated by males?

Do you think government policies of affirmative action and preferential tendering promote women’s interests?

Are women entering male jobs able to alter workplace power relations?

Do you think women benefit from short-term contracts and flexible work conditions?

Do you think women are able to alter decision making in the home?

Do you think your children/family benefit from your job in the construction/fishing industry?

Female entrepreneurs

What motivated you to apply for your current sub-contract?

How did you acquire the skills to manage and operate your SMME in a male-dominated environment?

Do you think government policies of affirmative action and preferential tendering promote women’s interests?

Are women entering male-dominated industries able to alter workplace power relations?

Do you think women benefit from short-term sub-contracts and flexible work conditions?

Do you think women are able to alter decision making in the home?

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Do you think your children/family benefit from your job in the construction/fishing industry?

The in-depth qualitative questionnaires were designed to elicit information on reasons why women accepted jobs with their current employer:

What is her previous occupational history and what are the reasons for participation in paid work?

How and why has the household power relations changed as a result of women taking up paid work?

How has the family income changed since women entered government targeted employment?

How have male colleagues responded to women’s participation in work normally reserved for men?