(Minimum Wage Enforcement) Efforts Meant to Help Workers Batter South Africa’s Poor

New York Times ^ | September 26, 2010 | CELIA W. DUGGER

[reaganaut1]

NEWCASTLE, South Africa — The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor — the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown — clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it.

“Why? Why?” shouted Nokuthula Masango, 25, after the authorities carted away bolts of gaily colored fabric.

She made just $36 a week, $21 less than the minimum wage, but needed the meager pay to help support a large extended family that includes her five unemployed siblings and their children.

The women’s spontaneous protest is just one sign of how acute South Africa’s long-running unemployment crisis has become. With their own industry in ruinous decline, the victim of low-wage competition from China, and too few unskilled jobs being created in South Africa, the women feared being out of work more than getting stuck in poorly paid jobs.

In the 16 years since the end of apartheid, South Africa has followed the prescriptions of the West, opening its market-based economy to trade, while keeping inflation and public debt in check. It has won praise for its efforts, and the economy has grown, but not nearly fast enough to end an intractable unemployment crisis.

For over a decade, the jobless rate has been among the highest in the world, fueling crime, inequality and social unrest in the continent’s richest nation. The global economic downturn has made the problem much worse, wiping out more than a million jobs. Over a third of South Africa’s workforce is now idle.

[reaganaut1]

The minimum wage reduces the wage of "underpaid" workers to zero (or what they can get in the black market). Since black workers on average less skilled than white workers, raising the minimum wage hurts them the most. Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have written about this, but we've elected a Zero who refuses to accept this.

[Repeal The 17th]

The “real” minimum wage is zero.

[DH]

“We are the government and we are here to help you!”

Once the tainted finger of government touches anything, it begins to rot.

[LibLieSlayer]

South Africa is the new Rhodesia... screw the names that the commies want us to call those tribal groups.

LLS