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Item A gendered analysis of labour market outcomes in South Africa during Covid-19: Evidence from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06-22) Selman, Cheryl-Lyn; Casale, DanielaThe global financial crisis of 2008-2009 disproportionately affected men’s employment. As has been the case in previous economic slumps, industries like manufacturing which predominantly employed men, experienced deeper declines (Mosomi et al 2020). However, soon after the Covid-19 pandemic started spreading globally, early predictions were that women would be hit harder by the Covid-19 crisis than men, because of the kinds of sectors (i.e. industries) and jobs (i.e. less secure, part-time, not UIF registered etc.) in which women dominated (Alon et al 2020; Dingel and Neiman 2020; Joyce and Xu 2020, Mongey and Weinberg 2020; Mosomi et al 2020), and also because of their role in childcare. Growing empirical research suggested this was indeed the case. In addition, women’s employment was slower to recover than men’s as economies reopened (Mosomi et al 2020, Casale and Shepherd 2021), and pre-Covid inequalities had worsened (Casale and Shepherd 2021). The gender gap persisted, even once occupation fixed effects and the proportion of work-from-home tasks as well as education had been used to account for individual differences in workforces in the UK and US (Adams- Prassl et al 2020).Item Gender-union wage gap in South Africa: an unconditional quantile regression & coarsened exact matching approach(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Hlapisi, Nthabiseng; Gwatidzo, TendaiSouth African women have been fairing badly in the labour market compared to their male counterparts since pre-colonial times due to both cultural and legal restrictions (and discrimination). Despite the corrective measures (e.g. legislation changes) that were introduced by the South African government post-apartheid to improve women’s social status, labour market conditions remain unfavorable for women. Labour unions are actively advocating for gender equality as well as higher and more equitable salaries. However, the extant literature on unions and wages pay more attention on the impact of unions and wages. There is paucity of literature on the moderating role of unions on the gender-wage inequality. This study contributes to the literature by investigating the impact of labour unions on the gender-wage inequality in South Africa, using the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) data obtained from the DataFirst website for the 2008 to 2017 waves. Furthermore, this study uses more recent econometric techniques, viz. unconditional quantile regression (UQR) and coarsened exact matching (CEM) methods with interaction effects, on a panel of 12,881 individuals. These methods are superior than the ones used in the extant literature as they control individual heterogeneities, sample attrition and selection bias that may arise from individuals’ decisions to join unions. Both the CEM and UQR results suggest a strong positive relationship between unions and wages in South Africa. In addition, both models suggest that labour unions narrow down the existing gender-wage gap in South Africa. However, this impact is weakened at higher-ends of the income distribution as the magnitude by which unions reduce the gender-wage gap reduces at higher percentiles (i.e. the 75th and 90th percentiles). This is possibly due to high-incomeearners being individuals with higher productive abilities (such as higher levels of education and additional skills) and therefore having more bargaining power to negotiate their own wages in the absence of unions. Another possible explanation could be that high productive abilities are a signal to employers that an individual will be able to do the job better than individuals with low productive abilities. This leads to employers being able to better estimate wages for such individuals outside the bargaining power of unions. These findings are important as they indicate that either unions have a weakened bargaining power for high-income earners, or that the high-income earners experience less gender-wage discriminations. It is therefore worthwhile for policymakers to analyse such trends before implementing “one-for-all” union policies and other related policies aimed at reducing gender inequalityItem Social reproduction, labour markets, and economic change in South Africa(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Francis, David Campbell; Valodia, ImraanThe South African rural economy, and its relationship to the industrial economic heartlands, has been the focus of study for many decades. In the 1970s, Harold Wolpe provided an incisive materialist analysis of apartheid. He argued that the rural economy served as a site of the reproduction of labour for capitalism in urban South Africa, thus ensuring a supply of cheap labour. His cheap labour thesis has formed the backbone of political economy analysis in South Africa ever since. But Wolpe, and other such as Mike Morris, who studied the relationship between the rural economy and the development of capitalism in South Africa, were largely unconcerned with the highly gendered nature of cheap labour, despite the fact that women were actively excluded from mining and the industrial economy by law, and played a critical role in the reproduction of life and labour in the Bantustans. Following the end of apartheid, the legal barriers preventing women from working in the main economy were dismantled, and women’s labour force participation rose rapidly. But this legal equality has not translated into substantive equality: women in rural areas continue to be significantly worse off economically than men. Unemployment rates are significantly higher for women, and they earn lower wages than men, even where they do the same work. Women continue to undertake far more unpaid work than men, and girl and women-headed households are more likely to live in poverty. Furthermore, despite well-developed literature on South Africa’s political economy, we know little about the productive and reproductive lives of rural women in contemporary South Africa. This thesis critically re-examines Wolpe for the 21st century by providing a materialist, gendered analysis of the economy of Agincourt, Mpumalanga, an area which remains on South Africa’s geographic and economic periphery. It shows how households in this part of rural South Africa are responding to the ways in which capitalism in South Africa has changed in the post-apartheid period. This thesis illuminates the important links between labour force participation, paid work, unpaid work, and livelihood strategies among households in the Agincourt area. It argues that focusing on the role of South Africa’s rural areas as sites of the reproduction of labour, as per the cheap labour thesis, ignores the highly gendered nature of social reproduction and its contribution to the reproduction of both labour and life. This thesis further contends that the role of South Africa’s rural areas cannot be investigated or theorised without a specifically gendered approach which includes women’s work in the analysis. It adds to our knowledge about an area of South Africa which is important in its own right. And Agincourt is also emblematic of the conceptual and methodological challenges of studying rural areas and their relationship with the economic 8 heartlands of urban South Africa in a way that does not marginalise the economic lives of women. It further contributes methodologically and epistemologically to studying the intersection of paid and unpaid work. It draws on a mixed-methods approach – a household survey of 600 households and 24 in-depth interviews – to investigate women’s economic lives in this marginalised place, and to re-examine the relationship between South Africa’s economic core and its periphery from an explicitly gendered perspectivItem Fields of study and graduates’ labour market outcomes in South Africa(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Osunde, Sharon Wanbianoseh; Roberts, GarethThis study investigates job-education mismatch in South Africa based on graduates’ fields of study. Using data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the period 2015 to 2019, we explore graduate endpoints in the labour market by determining how well-matched they are to their occupation and the association between being horizontally or vertically mismatched on earnings as well as job tenure. The results of the study found that Education and Health graduates are better matched to their occupations than Commerce and STEM graduates. Using a multinomial logistic regression to evaluate the likelihood of working in a match occupation, the study found that Commerce graduates are the most likely to transition into an occupation that they are overeducated for, while STEM graduates are more likely to transition into a horizontally mismatched occupation when compared to the other fields of study observed. Furthermore, using Mincerian OLS regressions, the study found a significant negative association between earnings and being overeducated among STEM and Commerce graduates. Lastly, this study also found a significant negative association between being horizontally mismatched and tenure among STEM and Commerce youth graduates