Op-eds

The (mostly) unacknowledged commitment of public teachers and health workers (Part 2)

Nurses Parade with the Port Shepstone nursing drum majorettes at King Zwelithini Stadium in Umlazi on May 12, 2023 in Durban, South Africa. The commemoration of International Nurses Day presented an opportunity for nurses to engage with patients and members of the community, while enjoying festivities in celebration of their day. (Photo by Gallo Images/Darren Stewart)

By Jeff Rudin

23 Oct 2024

For teachers and medical professionals, the private sectors beckon as havens, together with much better pay. They could also add to the brain drain, but they mostly don’t. Instead, they endure reading that the government and economists hold their greediness (partially) responsible for South Africa’s dire economy.

Part 2 in a three-part series. Read Part 1 here.

The Centre for Risk Analysis is typical in drawing attention to the “lack of service delivery that has accompanied” the public sector wage bill of R721-billion.

That the mere mention of poor service delivery is immediately understood by those with limited use of the public sector is — besides prejudice — almost certainly because of their experience of load shedding and, for those in Gauteng, of water outages as well.

What they selectively don’t recognise is both the restored efficiency of SARS and that its staff is paid out of the supposedly outrageous public sector wage bill.

Exclusions by the selective perceptions required to blame public sector workers in general additionally include:

Population growth; civil service shrinkage:

In 1994 there were one million public servants. In 2006, the government’s workforce was 1.33 million, according to the Treasury. Today, it is down to 1.2 million, yet South Africa’s population has almost doubled from 34 million in 1994 to 62 million today.

This is why Matthew Parks, the acting national spokesperson and parliamentary coordinator of labour federation Cosatu, warns that “we should not fall for a reckless narrative that says the public service is bloated”.

A living wage:

A 2022 research paper titled, “Living Wages In South Africa: A Business Argument and Approach – Position Paper 1” is especially important because it is a business document, with the involvement of the University of Cape Town’s Faculty of Commerce. The Position Paper found that “employers should work towards paying a monthly minimum net income of R12,000-R15,000 for a 40-hour working week”.

In June 2024, the same business research group found that the average South African should earn at least R15,000 per month if they are to live a “decent life”.

In 2023, Unicef, an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide, published the latest in a long-standing collaboration between three South African research institutes — the Social Policy Initiative, the Southern African Social Policy Research Institute and the Labour Research Service.

Based on 22 Socially Perceived Necessities, it found that the median monthly household income for respondents possessing all 22 Socially Perceived Necessities is R18,102 with the mean being R28,843. For respondents possessing 10 or fewer Socially Perceived Necessities, the median monthly household income was R2,263 with the mean being R3,929.

Forty-two percent of this latter group have salaries as the main source of household income, which is a measure of what has become known as the “working poor”. Thirty-eight percent of this group were dependent on social grants as the main source of income.

Before austerity cuts, Stats SA used to undertake invaluable Living Conditions Surveys as part of its household survey programme. Living Conditions Surveys provided detailed information on households’ living circumstances, as well as their income and expenditure patterns.

Due to budget cuts, Stats SA has not been able to collect information on poverty since 2015. It has a current 21% vacancy rate but is under a hiring freeze. The last Living Conditions Survey, for 2014/15, found that almost half (49.2%) of the adult population were living in poverty. The World Bank found that 55.5 % of the population were living in poverty in 2014.

Another measure of the scale of the problem is the previously mentioned working poor. Indicative of the size of the problem is that, although far from being a living wage, about 33% of the workforce nonetheless received wage increases when the National Minimum Wage was introduced in 2018.

Aggravating the poverty reproduced by those receiving the National Minimum Wage is the large-scale non-compliance with the statutory minimum, as even the National Minimum Wage Commission acknowledged in 2024

Economists help the rich to live with the poverty that can’t be selectively denied:

The rich accommodate the reality of South Africa being the world’s most unequal society either by selective denial or, with the aid of their economists, by invoking the trickle-down rationalisation, as the minister of agriculture did as recently as 3 October.

This is the idea that the only way to address poverty is by making the rich richer, for the expanded wealth will eventually trickle down to the poor. What could be more convenient to the rich than economic “science” proving that making oneself even richer helps alleviate poverty!

As long ago as 1982, John Galbraith, the famed – though iconoclastic – US economist had this to say about the trickle-down rationalisation, in an article aptly titled “Recession Economics”: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

Austerity budget cuts:

Daily Maverick’s Ray Mahlaka, in a November 2023 article, “Treasury adopts a new approach to rein in bloated public servants’ wage bill”, tells us, as an instance of this bloated pay, that almost half (48%) of public servants will earn between the annual ranges of R350,001 and R600,000 in 2023/24.

The good news, for him, is that the Treasury is now determined to limit above-consumer inflation percentage increases paid to public servants. Henceforth, the Treasury will provide money only to attract essential or hard-to-retain frontline professions, beginning with teachers and health professionals.

For everyone else, provincial departments will have to cover any pay increases from their existing budgets. In recognition of the unfairness of the government negotiating pay deals it knew its priorities made unaffordable, the Treasury agreed to cover some of the funding.

Despite this arrangement, provinces have increasingly been left with the choice of either not filling vacant posts and/or making people redundant and/or finding other savings. Still further deterioration in service provision is unavoidable, regardless of which choice is made.

Consequences of austerity on both workers and the Treasury-recognised essential services they provide:

The starting pay for the teacher with a four-year BEd degree is R333,624, as we have already seen. Despite the official recognition of teachers being essential, they all fall into the group the Treasury has identified as being mainly responsible for the unaffordable “bloated” public servants pay.

Unusually for ministers, the Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, tells things more or less as they are. She does so in two Daily Maverick articles on her public statement made at the end of September 2024. The first is “Education budget cuts — Gwarube targets graft, SOE bailouts, seeks urgent finance minister meeting”, with the second being “Basic Education budget cuts ‘exacerbate inequalities and undermine right to education’ – civil society groups”.

From these reports, she acknowledges:

The financial crisis had been “years in the making because of aggressive budget cuts, economic stagnation and fiscal mismanagement across government, which is now set to impact schools”.

“Nationally, the number of learners within the education system has increased by about 292,820 over the last five years. An increase in learners’ number without increasing the post basket, may affect the quality of teaching, which may soon be reflected in the performance of the system”.

“It is important to note that (there) have been cuts in (provincial) posts but… no person gets retrenched… rather vacancies are not filled”.

“To fully grasp why we are here and more importantly how we got here, we must look back and acknowledge that as a government, we have not made the right choices at the right time.”

Such forthrightness is probably due to Siviwe Gwarube being the DA’s new minister in the Government of National Unity.

Filling in what the minister didn’t say, includes:

Her chief financial officer in the Department of Basic Education, Patrick Khunou, said the budget shortfall for all nine provinces was between R79-billion and R1,018-billion from the 2021-22 financial year through to the 2027/28 financial years. The minimum amount is interim pending some provinces still having to provide full figures for all the years in question. These details of the provincial impact were given at a 19 September meeting Gwarube held with members of the executive councils (MECs) from all nine provinces and the Treasury to address the urgency of financial support for education.

The cuts have left many teaching posts hanging in the balance, as in KwaZulu-Natal where 11,000 teaching jobs are at risk of being cut, and, in the Western Cape, 2,407 contract posts are at risk of non-renewal in 2025, which sparked protest from civil society groups quoted in the second article.

It is too simple to say teacher salary increases have been the cause of South Africa’s financial woes, for there hasn’t been a salary increase since 2021-2022. Their first increase, in 2023, was an inflationary increase but only after three years of no increases. Moreover, the 2024/25 Budget’s proposed 3.2% increase for basic education personnel might seem like a step forward, rather than the actual 2.2% real cut once inflation is factored in.

Education budget cuts also affect such important services as school transport, the national school nutrition programme, learning materials and infrastructure maintenance.

There are other important issues — such as the impact of budget cuts and related uncertainties — on the various teaching professionals as well as the financial alternatives precluded by the rationality of mainstream thinking. Some of these issues will be addressed as part of the health service, recognised by the Treasury as an essential service needing special support.

Public health is in an intensive care unit that is itself sick:

The length of this article precludes even a brief outline of this issue. The gruesome details are, conveniently, in essence, the same as education — save for one important fact. Doctors earn considerably more than the teachers held as accomplices to the ailments besetting our economy. Yet, doctors are exempt from the vituperation heaped on teachers. Why this is so will be suggested in Part 3 of this article.

For now, I leave you with two of the Daily Maverick articles on which I would have drawn: First “Medical day zero – catastrophic budget cuts endanger Western Cape’s three academic hospitals”. The second is: “Western Cape health professionals make united appeal for ‘catastrophic budget cuts’ to be halted”.

The (mostly) unacknowledged commitment of public teachers and health workers:

The stress of teaching overcrowded classes in badly maintained schools to unfed learners; or covering for ever-increasing unfilled medical posts, along with the frustration of not having the needed equipment or equipment left broken for several months; plus not knowing when your working conditions will deteriorate still further, assuming, of course, that you still have a job, begs the largely ignored question of why they stay in the public sector.

The private education and health sectors beckon as havens, together with much better pay. They could also add to the brain drain like the growing numbers of South Africans who move abroad.

But they mostly don’t. Instead, they endure reading that the government and economists hold their greediness (partially) responsible for South Africa’s dire economy.

Behind the rationality of all these selective perceptions — because there is a rationality — is neoliberalism. This, together with the incompetence that exists within levels of the public service, will be covered in the concluding part of this series. DM

This article is published jointly with the journal Amandla.

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