Microsoft Word 6-057 a gentler Capitalism Final version June 2006. doc
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8 reward those businesses that voluntarily participated in BEE. Most notably, several agencies altered their procurement and licensing requirements to favor companies with blacks in ownership or management positions. The government also provided affirmative action guidelines. In a pivotal development, the Employment Equity Act, passed by Parliament on October 12, 1998, required South African companies with more than fifty employees to take concrete measures to increase previously disadvantaged group (PDG) representation. Companies had to make information available about the PDG profiles of their workforce within each occupational category and level. Where the profiles revealed PDG under-representation, companies were required to state in an Employment Equity Plan, “the numerical goals to achieve the equitable representation of suitably qualified people from designated groups within each occupational category and level in the workforce, the timetable within which this is to be achieved, and the strategies intended to achieve those goals.” 18 Since the growth of the South African economy was just keeping pace with the growth in population, many white workers worried that the workforce could not become more representative of the general population without whites being forced out of jobs. The wave of black business people who began to enter corporate South Africa or found their own businesses had virtually no capital and no business experience. They were entering a racist business world where wealth had been generated by using blacks as extraordinarily cheap labor. To aid in the BEE process, the government facilitated the creation of special investment vehicles to enable black entrepreneurs to acquire divested assets. The country’s first BEE equity deal occurred in 1993 when one of South Africa’s largest companies sold 10% of a subsidiary to New African Investment Limited (NAIL), a consortium of black businessmen. The deal was funded using NAIL’s new shares of the subsidiary as collateral. Other deals followed in the wake, creating a new black business class. Individuals with strong “struggle credentials” and political connections were sought to participate in these deals and serve on boards and as management as a sign of the corporations’ cooperation with the new era. These new black business people planned to deploy the leadership, negotiation, and organizing skills learned in the anti-apartheid movement to complete successfully deals and mobilize employees. But they encountered a steep learning curve about the financial and cultural aspects of business. Still, this was a period of optimism as new black companies began to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Within three years, fifty-three listed companies had black influence and twenty-eight were black controlled. South Africa had its first black millionaires. However, success was short-lived. Some of the most important black companies were soon embroiled in governance scandals, while others found themselves in financial ruin after the Asian market crash of 1998. Most of the increase in black ownership had been in the form of passive investments financed by the big conglomerates that controlled 75% of the market capitalization of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Very few of these first black empowerment groups took active operational control of the businesses underlying their investments. Few built their economic strength on a foundation of organic growth.
18 Employment Equity Act, 1998. 9 In 2001, the World Bank ranked South Africa’s income distribution as one of the most inequitable in the world. 19 Inequality levels in the country have remained relatively unchanged since the days of apartheid. A notable decline in inter-racial inequality was matched by rising intra-racial inequality, especially within the majority African population. 20
Some of the country’s blacks prospered through participation in the formal economy, while many others fell farther behind.
As the BEE process unfolded, critics questioned whether the measures adopted were simply making a handful of black people very rich while creating the illusion of black participation. Cynical critics, including President Thabo Mbeki’s own brother Moeletsi Mbeki, contended that a kind of “window-dressing” empowerment was the real goal of white-sponsored empowerment and the blacks who facilitated the deals were co- opted. Less critical observers pointed out that neither the black nor white business people involved in these early deals had figured out how best to transfer assets quickly and effectively across racial groups. As high levels of unemployment 21 and poverty persisted in the black communities, the efficacy of voluntary BEE programs was hotly debated and the call for more aggressive government action gained strength. In May 1998, The Black Economic Empowerment Commission (BEECom) was created under the auspices of the Black Business Council (BBC), an umbrella body representing eleven black business organizations. The ambition of the BEECom’s work was to develop an integrated socio- economic program aimed at “redressing the imbalances of the past by seeking to substantially and equitably transfer and confer the ownership, management and control of South Africa’s financial and economic resources to the majority of its citizens.” The Commission, of which Charnley was a member, conducted extensive research and consultations with the government, unions, and “established business.” After two years of work, the BEECom held a conference in which over 1000 people were in attendance to receive their preliminary report. 22 In its final report, the Commission stated that unless black people participated in the economy more broadly and substantively, the South African economy could never achieve sustained rates of growth. In short, the Commission asserted that meeting the needs of the poor and marginalized
19 This ranking uses Gini coefficients to order inequality. South Africa ranks 5 th lowest among the 88 countries with recorded Gini coefficients (The World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001). 20
Economics Research, 2002, p. 17. In addition, J. Seekings and N. Nattrass note that the gap between better-off African people and poorer African people continued to grow after 2000, and that it was largely caused by trends in the labor market. Upward mobility among a minority continued to be driven by movement into higher paying occupations. For people in formal employment, wages and hence incomes rose in real terms. But rising unemployment meant that poverty persisted and even deepened. See J. Seekings and N. Nattrass, Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 45.
21 Unemployment rates among African blacks hovered around forty percent. 22 Virtually ninety-percent of the attendees were black—including most of the black business elite. Despite being invited to the conference, the white business leaders chose not to attend. Yüklə 267,43 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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