PI: Beverly J. Silver Co-PI: Benjamin Scully Institution: Johns Hopkins University
This study examines how the decline of formal wage labor affected the livelihood strategies of South African workers. The researchers evaluate the hypothesis that formal wage labor's decline has led South Africans to increasingly rely on historically important livelihood strategies that involve sharing and cooperation across the divides of employed-unemployed, formal-informal, and rural-urban. Data will be gathered through existing household surveys as well as original ethnographic research on the livelihood strategies of selected South African households.
Broader Impacts: The findings will contribute to debates about labor market and welfare policy in South Africa and other middle-income countries by highlighting livelihood strategies that are shared across the employed-unemployed divide. These strategies may be the basis for social welfare policy that could benefit and enjoy political support from a broad cross-section of workers.
This project examined the effects of formal wage labor's decline on household incomes in South Africa. The project evaluated the widely held assumption that formal workers are becoming increasingly isolated, both economically and socially, from the majority of the labor force that is in informal work or unemployed. This assumption has important implications for development and welfare policies in South Africa and peer countries in the global South. The research activities included analysis of national household survey data and interviews with informants in rural and urban sites about their work history and household economics. The research demonstrated that South Africans have responded to the decline of formal wage income by relying on a broad mix of wage and non-wage income sources. Our research demonstrated the widespread use of livelihood strategies based on both top-down transfers (from employed individuals and households to the unemployed) and bottom-up subsidies (from the unemployed to the employed). This interdependence between the employed and unemployed calls into question the assumption that formal workers are economically and socially isolated from the un- and underemployed majority. These findings suggest that development strategies that undermine formal workers wages in order to expand low-wage work will not necessarily have a net positive effect on livelihoods in South Africa or elsewhere.
