Economic
Freedom Continues to Elude South African Blacks
Government hopes affirmative action will erase financial
divide, but business community is mixed on potential for true change.
By Jeff Gove
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Mercedes, BMWs, and Audis fill the spaces in the parking lot of Johannesburg's Rosebank Mall. Inside, retailers offer Armani suits, fine wines, diamonds — any luxury you can buy in Europe or the United States. Outside, weary shoppers escape from the oppressive African sun under café umbrellas, sipping cappuccinos and eating foccacia bread sandwiches. With few exceptions, the patrons in Rosebank are white, the clerks and waiters black.
Rosebank is a typical white South African neighborhood.
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Scrap metal dwellings stretch into the distance in Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's poorest slums. Photo by Mimi Chakarova. |
Ten minutes away, garbage litters the sidewalks and human waste flows through the gutters. Scrap metal dwellings stretch into the distance as far as the eye can see. This is Alexandra, one of South Africa's most sorrowful slums. At the edge of the tin shanties runs a polluted creek that doubles as a dumping ground for more garbage and a playground for children.
Alexandra is a typical black South African neighborhood.
When democracy came to South Africa in 1994, the country's black majority hoped that its new political strength would bring blacks a share in the riches of Africa's wealthiest nation. Six years later, economic power remains firmly in the hands of whites. Though blacks make up over 75 percent of the country's population, they hold only 17 percent of the skilled jobs in the country and just 5 percent of the management positions, according to the South African Labor Department. Blacks also account for about 90 percent of South Africa's unemployed workers.
In an effort to narrow the gap between black and white, the government passed a series of employment laws in 1998 mandating, among other things, affirmative action and job training in private companies. In June, the first phase of the new regulations goes into effect. Companies with more than 150 employees must detail the progress they're making to hire more black, female and disabled workers. Eventually all businesses in the country will have to submit a long-term plan for matching their employment rolls with the demographics of the country.
It's a social experiment arguably more ambitious and daunting than anything ever undertaken in the United States, a place where limited attempts at a representative society fell to accusations of unfairness and tokenism. But South Africa has so far managed to negotiate a fragile peace between past injustices and present realities, and many are hopeful this experiment will continue that legacy.
Fred Daniels is an affirmative action success story. As Colleague Development Manager at the Cape Town office of American pharmaceutical giant Warner-Lambert, Daniels is overseeing the company's compliance with the new labor regulations. His company is one of the first in the country to launch its employment equity plan.
Daniels, a colored or mixed race South African, began working on Warner-Lambert's factory floor in 1971. Nine years later, he became a department supervisor under a policy of advancing non-whites, and eventually finished both high school and college while continuing to work for the company. By 1993 he had moved into management, overseeing all job training in Warner-Lambert's South African operations. He is now the man in charge of making sure the company meets the demands of the new South Africa.
"It's not going to be easy," Daniels said, leaning over the conference table in his top-floor office. To his left sat a bookshelf filled with training manuals, psychology texts and the latest management handbooks. He pointed to a spread sheet on the table showing that just three of the company's 94 managers are black, and only 24 are women. "It calls for a major paradigm shift, and I don't think it's going to happen overnight."
But Warner-Lambert is exceeding the government's current expectations, and Daniels attributes the head start to being an American corporation. That may sound odd given the declining popularity of affirmative action in the United States, but in South Africa it makes sense.
Historically, American companies have been the main practitioners of affirmative action in South Africa. During the waning years of Apartheid, these companies adopted the principles of the Sullivan Code — a system of ethics that compelled companies to hire, train and promote non-whites if they wanted to stay in South Africa and avoid boycotts of their products in the U.S. — rather than bowing to political pressure to close their South African operations.
"In the old Sullivan days we had to go out and recruit people from all races," Daniels said, but the company cancelled its affirmative action policies with the changeover to democracy in 1994. "I think we have slipped back a little bit."
Wayne Muller, production manager in the Cape Town factory, agrees.
"There's been too few success stories given what we had to work with," said Muller, facing the wall of windows in his spacious office. One of a scattering of black managers in the company, Muller rose from intern to head of the entire manufacturing process in just ten years. On the wall hangs his diploma from the University of Cape Town, a school that practiced affirmative action even during Apartheid.
But Muller said his black colleagues without university degrees have not fared so well since the Sullivan years, most remaining at the bottom of the company. A quick look at Daniels' spread sheet shows that about 80 percent of the company's black employees are clustered in unskilled or semi-skilled positions. Muller said that's because many of the white men in management aren't really committed to affirmative action, and now that the government is getting involved those attitudes are coming to the surface.
"Sullivan was definitely there but it wasn't in people's faces. Now everyone has to go through training sessions and sensitivity workshops," Muller said. "There's a lot of resentment and negativity. Suddenly people feel very aggrieved by it."
Jonathan Yudelowitz, a management consultant at Gemini Consulting in suburban Johannesburg, isn't surprised by Muller's assessment of the current situation.
"People only comply with legislation, they don't commit to it," Yudelowitz said, sitting in front of a cooler stocked with mineral water and soda in the small lunch room of Gemini's office. Like hip American software companies, Gemini offers its employees free beverages.
"I think the ultimate purpose of doing all this is sound. It's not normal to have four million whites running a country that's made up of thirty-nine million peopleÉ But social engineering doesn't work. That's where the American experience can be universalized."
During the height of the Sullivan years, Yudelowitz studied discouraging experiences of black managers in South Africa as a master's student, and later ran affirmative action programs at several companies where he worked in human resources. He found that, rather than helping people reach their potential, affirmative action programs often stifled the growth of talented workers because relationships with mentors were forced.
"The growth of a person relies on relationships between people," Yudelowitz said. As he talked, Yudelowitz greeted several black colleagues. He was quick to point out that these co-workers were hired on merit alone.
"If I have no choice as a leader or a manager, I don't think that relationship will be real."
Yudelowitz believes the companion legislation to the Equity Act — the Skills Development Act — will go much farther in alleviating the country's problems. Similar to the Equity Act, the Skills Development Act requires employers to submit annual plans and progress reports on worker training programs. Business executives and managers, he said, will be much more motivated by the idea of investing in their current employees, and the large base of mostly black, non-skilled workers will naturally move up into higher positions.
In reality, the opposite is happening: Dealing with the Equity Act is forcing companies to think seriously about worker training. According to Daniels, competition for qualified black, female and disabled workers is already so high — especially for executives — that companies must either groom their own employees for advancement or hire unqualified people.
"We can't afford to hire unqualified people," Daniels said, adding that he has a personal bias against token appointments. "Tokenism has caused untold devastation in people's lives. You can just see their confidence going down the tubes...I've been guarding against it quite jealously, sometimes to the dismay of my colleagues."
Though Daniels has won that battle with top management, Muller worries that his colleagues in middle management may not be so open minded, and wants the company to take greater steps to avoid the mistakes of the past. He thinks managers can be motivated to comply with the new rules and cultivate talented black, female and disabled workers even if they are opposed to affirmative action. The great motivator? Money.
Muller believes managers should be held accountable for the success or the failure of affirmative action programs within their departments. No progress, no raise. And because, he said, Warner-Lambert's system of performance evaluations accurately reflects whether someone is competent at their job or not, managers wouldn't just be able to hire token blacks and stick them in an office to rot. So far that's an idea Daniels and the executives upstairs still find a little radical.
Muller's hard-nose stance comes, not from a desire to force anyone's hand, nor from an overzealous support of affirmative action. It comes from experience. Having benefited from affirmative action himself, Muller knows well the demoralizing feeling of being a quota filler. Personally, he said, he dealt with that feeling because he was always qualified and competent at his job, and he hopes to make sure his employees can do the same.
"The reality is, it's a numbers thing, it is based on quotas," Muller said. "But I would not be able to reconcile myself for putting someone into a position that they are not ready for...At the end of the day, that person needs to say, 'I am black, I am a number, but I can do this job.'"