The Racial Employment Gap in South Africa (original) (raw)

Returns to race: Labour market discrimination in post-apartheid South Africa

2006

Abstract This paper empirically assesses the impact of post-1994 policy making on racial discrimination in the South African labour market. The post-apartheid government has implemented a series of remedial measures, including an ambitious set of black empowerment and affirmative action policies. The first part of the paper gives an overview of the South African labour market post-1994 and the most important legislation, regulations and other measures aimed at redressing the inequalities of the past.

Affirmative Action in South Africa: an empirical assessment of the impact on labour market outcomes

2010

Abstract This paper set out to investigate the impact of affirmative action in South Africa on labour market outcomes for the period 1997 to 2006. From our empirical analysis we observe that race and gender both played an important role in determining labour market outcomes–although the former is much more important than the latter–and that there is very little evidence to suggest that these effects are disappearing over time.

Affirmative Action: The Sword versus Shield Debate Continues

Affirmative action is a topic with a tendency to evoke much emotion and spark heated debate amongst South Africans from all walks of life. Yet few can deny the need for measures of some sort to address the racial inequality in the labour market experienced during the apartheid years. With this in mind, the article gives a broad overview of why affirmative action is necessary in South Africa as a tool for social change. Secondly, the article sketches the landscape of South Africa's jurisprudence on affirmative action, touching on relevant legislation, though limiting the discussion to whether affirmative action is a right in the hands of the scorned employee or a defence to be raised by the employer against that employee, with reference to case law. Lastly, the paper attempts to show how the Labour Court has answered this question unanimously in recent cases, in response to the decisions of Harmse v City of Cape Town ((2003) 24 ILJ 1130 (LC)) and Dudley v City of Cape Town & Others ((2004) 25 ILJ 305 (LC)).

Minding the gap: attitudes toward affirmative action in South Africa

Since its introduction, affirmative action has become an increasingly controversial policy to address labour market inequalities in South Africa. Yet, in spite of this public debate, nationally representative, empirical research on patterns of opposition to and support for the redress policy remains relatively circumscribed. In this article, attitudinal data collected over the past decade is employed to examine the factors that influence these perceptions, and the extent to which they have been changing. The results reveal that attitudes to race- and gender-based affirmative action in employment have been favourable on aggregate over the last decade. The specified beneficiary of affirmative action appears to matter, with more positive evaluations evident when the policies target women and disabled persons than when racial disadvantage is targeted. Furthermore, while there is a broad-based, resolute belief in racial equality in principle, there is less agreement on the implementation of particular redress policies. Affirmative action for instance enjoys less support than compensatory policies or those focused on addressing class-based disadvantage. An element of self-interest appears to be informing evaluations among designated beneficiary groups, with black respondents more inclined than other population groups to support race-based affirmative action and women more partial to gender-based affirmative action than men. While the beneficiaries of affirmative action have typically been the better educated and skilled among the designated groups, highest support for this policy is reported by the more marginalized and vulnerable who are least likely to have personally benefitted from affirmative action implementation to date. This support may reflect a sense of collective self-interest or possibly an expectation that this redress policy will bring benefits in the future. Finally, views on whether affirmative action is producing a more skilled workforce and socially cohesive society are again broadly positive, though the profile of those believing in such outcomes deviates somewhat from those supporting affirmative action generally. In this instance, those least likely to have gained from affirmative action in practice are those least confident in the policy’s outcomes, possibly due to a gap between perceived performance of affirmative action policy and expected benefits

Racial Wage Discrimination in South Africa: Before and After the First Democratic Election

2001

Apartheid in South Africa was formally discarded by the first free election in 1994. Prior to 1994, discrimination in the labour market was embodied in a number of policies (pass laws, occupational colour barring etc.). While such polices have been eliminated by the ANC government, it is likely that the eradication of racial wage discrimination altogether will be a lengthy process. In this working paper, racial wage discrimination is treated via a multilateral wage decomposition technique. Each observed wage differential is broken down into a productivity component and a discrimination component so that the extent of racial wage discrimination can be estimated. Using data collected just before 1993 and just after 1995 the first democratic election, it can be concluded that previous findings of long-term declining discrimination are reversed in the post-apartheid era.

The Impact of Affirmative Action on the Gendered Occupational Segregation in South Africa

2017

This paper studies the impact of an affirmative action policy on occupational segregation by gender in South Africa. We estimate effects of the Employment Equity Act of 1998, the Black Economic Empowerment Act in 2003 and the Codes of Good Conduct in 2007 on (Black) female employment in top occupations using individual level, repeated cross-section data of 21 years. The findings based on difference-in-difference-in-difference identification strategy show that the probability of Black female employment in top occupations increased after 2003, however it decreased after 2007. Overall, the effects are quite small. We offer several explanations for these effects.

Non-Racial Affirmative Action in Employment

@Liberty, 2014

The paper outlines the different forms that affirmative action policies can take. It argues that race based policies do not yield the positive results that they claim to offer. First, they do not properly compensate individuals for past injustices. Second, they create social burdens on those they purport to benefit. Third, they entrench the importance of race and require repugnant systems of racial classification. Fourth, they are unconstitutional on the grounds that they arbitrarily discriminate on the basis of race and they infringe the principle of non-racialism. It is argued that non-racial affirmative action policies are a desirable way of redressing past injustices, while ensuring that all citizens are provided with an equal opportunity to succeed. A just affirmative action policy should abandon the use of race as a proxy for disadvantage. A non-racial policy would examine an individual’s particular circumstances; such as their financial situation, their education background and their personal experiences of previous discrimination.