After the Bell: Of paper routes, petrol station attendants, typists and coal miners

11 Jan 2023

There are clearly those with a vested interest in keeping the coal fires burning in South Africa, and it has nothing to do with the workers.

Delivering newspapers at the age of 14 was my first job. I had two routes and 100 customers — making me the envy of my peers in the trade — and pocketed the princely sum of $30 a week for delivering the afternoon edition, by foot, of the main daily newspaper that kept Nova Scotia informed. This was from 1979 to 1980, when the headlines were often about the US diplomats held hostage in Iran.

One job I never did, but which several of my teenage friends and acquaintances took up on a part-time basis, was that of petrol station attendant (gas station attendant in North American parlance). One of my nephews pumped gas as a part-time job when he was in high school in the late 1990s. By that time, customers had the choice of “full service” or “self-service”, pointing to where the occupation was headed.

Another job that had wide currency in the 1980s was that of typist, which required a highly regarded skillset at the time. I, for one, type at a pace that would never have made the grade back then.

From 2006 to 2011, my wife and I resided in Dallas, Texas. I subscribed to the print edition of the Dallas Morning News, and my paper was delivered by car by a middle-aged man who probably held one or two other low-wage jobs, such as “greeting” at Walmart. (Many of these cast-offs of America’s white working class would subsequently vote for Donald Trump). The poor guy included handmade Christmas cards each year with the paper in the hopes of getting a tip. I could relate: I also appreciated Christmas tips when I delivered papers.

It goes without saying that adolescents were no longer hand-delivering newspapers by that time in North America. There were just not enough households on any street subscribing to print editions as news went digital — a kid would have had to walk all day if they had the number of customers I had. At that confluence in economic history, I was also pumping my own gas in Dallas, and the profession of typist had long ceased to exist as we all do it ourselves now with varying degrees of skill.

The resistance

Which brings me to the coalface.

There is a lot of resistance to the phasing out of coal — and the job of a coal miner — in South Africa. Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, a former coal miner himself, is the face of this resistance, but he is hardly alone. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which Mantashe once led, and other unions are also steadfast in their opposition.

One must always have empathy for working people whose livelihoods are on the line, and unions will always be wary of a trend that puts their members out of work.

The “pro-coal” argument in South Africa goes roughly along the following lines: South Africa is a developing economy attempting to erase the disparities of apartheid. (Many such inequities remain because of ANC failures, but anyway). As such, it should not have to cut its greenhouse gas emissions at anything near the pace of the world’s developed economies, whose carbon footprint is mostly responsible for climate change and enabled their industrialisation. South Africa also has abundant coal and needs to utilise the resources at hand for its development.

Such reasoning, unlike the nonsensical drivel about “base-load”, is not without merits. That doesn’t take away from the fact that it is also extremely short-sighted.

Let’s take the occupations outlined above.

Adolescents in North America and many other places no longer have the opportunity to deliver newspapers by hand or bike to make their first bucks. But we are hardly going to pull the plug on the digital revolution — which has mostly been a force of good, opening vast opportunities across the global economy while lifting productivity by unprecedented levels — to rectify this state of affairs. This also obviously applies to typists.

Petrol station attendants are in a slightly different boat. In North America and other developed regions, their demise is a consequence mostly of cost-cutting. The first self-serve station opened in Los Angeles in 1947, but the ball really got rolling during the oil shock of the 1970s and gradually gained traction. Many people miss the full-service option and don’t mind paying a bit more for it, and some stations in the US still retain that offering.

In South Africa, petrol stations employ around 70,000 staff and they in turn will have many dependants. With an unemployment rate that is effectively well over 40%, there is no way the government is going to liberalise things to allow for self-service. Judging from Uber’s initial start here, the first such station would probably get torched in protest. And I for one don’t mind paying a bit more for the full-service option.

But labour costs at the lower end of the wage scale are very different here and North America also has historically low unemployment rates. In the US, it’s only 3.5%. And petrol pumpers there would not have had nearly the same ratio of dependants per worker as what obtains in South Africa.

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Which brings us back to coal miners.

South Africa’s mining sector has been shedding jobs for decades. The decline of the gold sector has been the main driver as production has plunged along with depths and grades, while costs have soared. The trend was arrested in the first decade of this century as production and employment grew in platinum and coal. But the overall trend has been downward.

In 2011, according to data compiled by the Minerals Council SA, the main industry group, total employment in the mining sector was 513,000, with coal accounting for 78,580 jobs. In 2021, total mining employment was 459,000 with coal’s total amounting to 92,670.

So coal has had some employment growth and accounts for a rising percentage of mineworkers, which helps to explain why labour wants to preserve those jobs in a dwindling pool of potential members. It’s also the case that each mineworker typically has about eight to 10 dependants. I had none when I was a paper carrier, so the loss of my routes would not have been a household catastrophe. I did move on to other part-time employment and my working single mother could still put food on the table.

But there are other forces at work here. Mining employment is also falling because of mechanisation, automation and digitisation — the same trends that undermined newspaper carriers, typists and those who pump petrol. If the coal sector is still viable 20 years hence — and that is a big if — there is little chance that it will have remotely the same employment levels that it does today.

The global economy is also moving swiftly to address the climate crisis through decarbonisation. This is creating mammoth economic and job opportunities that will dwarf those linked to the coal sector, which is increasingly being starved of the capital it requires to sustain production. It is simply becoming toxic for a swelling number of banks and investors.

Global decarbonisation also means that companies and industries with a large carbon footprint will be deprived of access to markets as green regulations such as tariffs kick in. This is a grave risk to the entire South African economy, given the fact that it is currently the most coal-dependent on the planet. It threatens to make South Africa an uninvestable destination for foreign capital.

Are we to sacrifice the economic wellbeing of tens of millions of mostly working-class South Africans on the altar of tens of thousands of coal jobs?

For that is ultimately what is at stake here, not to mention the pressing environmental imperatives. The European summer of 2022 was the hottest on record, and last year was the fifth warmest on record globally, Copernicus Climate Change Service reported this week.

Is it about the workers?

Given the scale of the stakes involved, why the rush to defend coal miners?

Beyond labour, there are clearly those with a vested interest in keeping the coal fires burning in South Africa, and it has sweet f-all to do with the workers. Fossil fuels, from oil to coal, just lend themselves to criminality and corruption in ways that sunshine does not.

It’s now abundantly clear that huge chunks of the coal value chain in South Africa have been captured by criminal syndicates. Meanwhile, the Department of Minerals and Energy has used almost Stalingrad-like tactics to prevent the establishment of a transparent mining cadastre that would enable investors and the public to see who procured many coal mining and prospecting rights and where.

In short, South Africa’s mafia state has spawned gangsters and corrupt interests that threaten to hold the rest of us hostage so they can enrich themselves through coal. Newspaper carriers, typists and petrol pumpers never had that kind of muscle to defend their turf. But then, this really has nothing to do with coal miners. DM/BM

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The resistance

Is it about the workers?