Markets on the Margins: Mineworkers, Job Creation and Enterprise Development

by Kate Philip

In 1987, workers in South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) staged a historic national strike, and 40,000 mineworkers lost their jobs. To assist them, the NUM set up a job creation programme, starting with worker co-operatives before shifting to wider enterprise development strategies. Against the backdrop of South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, this programme provided support in communities hard hit by escalating job losses onthe mines - including in neighbouring countries. In this book, Kate Philip, who ran NUM's job creation programme for over a decade, charts the often-difficult lessons learned from grappling with the limits and opportunities thatsuch market participation offer to reduce poverty and improve livelihoods. She explores whether and how it might be possible to make markets work better for the poor - and what the notion that markets are social constructs might mean for constructing them differently. Kate Philip is a Senior Economic Development Advisor in the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC) of South Africa's National Treasury. Through the International Labour Organisation, she has also been supporting the government of Greece in the design and development of a public employment programme.

364 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 20, 2018

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has it all: humour, insight, authority stemming from hard-earned experience, solid useful advice, and excellent anecdotes from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and their spin-off co-operatives. It is an excellent book for those of us interested in sustainable economic development. It's a reflection on 30 years of work towards economic autonomy for South Africans by the author, who worked on the NUM's economic development initiatives from the mid-80s onwards.
Philip describes the different iterations of their attempts to make sure that mineworkers had an income after being laid off from the mines. At first, during hard apartheid, these mass layoffs were often perpetrated by the white (and international) mine owners in retaliation against the miners' attempts to unionise and organise. The union took responsibility for their members' livelihoods and tried setting them up in workers' co-operatives. Even though the situation was dire and the entire system agains them, Philip recalls the sometimes comic events with good cheer and humour that had me laughing. The union's strategies had to change several times and Philip charts these different approaches too, describing why they did or didn't work: different types of co-operatives, small enterprise development, enterprise development centres, registering as an NGO, market development (a neoliberal approach that basically pitted the organisation against the people it was supposed to support) and crafts and fruit processing for the tourist sector. Most of the income-generation ideas that float around NGOs are evaluated here, from experience, not theory, coming from a place where the support organisation was working with the mineworkers' own resurces (not outside funding) and hence had no margin for error. Philip also brings up history and economic structures, naturally, since they influence poor people's attempts to earn a living in fundamental ways - for example, if you are a small bakery making make biscuits, in you are competing against a state-subsidised giant corporation with access to credit, cheap inputs, advertising and a far-reaching distribution apparatus. This is also something that many NGOs ignore when suggesting income-generating activities for "beneficiaries".
I can't recommend this book highly enough for development studies students, aid agencies, NGO employees, people running co-ops or other enterprises in the solidarity economy, and anyone interested in South Africa.