The establishment of baseline artisan productivities as a means to monitoring employment-intensive construction: comparison to a South African case study

Abstract

The need to establish baseline artisan productivities in the South African employmentintensive construction sector stems from the fact that these productivity norms have not been reviewed on a frequent basis. To others, these productivity norms hardly exist. With both scenarios, it is difficult to compare artisan productivity trends in the last fifty years to the trend of international standards. Constructive efforts have been made in this document to highlight the productivity norms that have existed within the building industry since the 1950’s. A similar exercise has been done for the USA and other European countries, notably the UK. A comparison of these trends of productivity norms has revealed that the current artisan productivity figures in South Africa are the lowest since the 1950’s. Again, they are the lowest amongst these countries. In the 1950’s, the artisan productivity norms in South Africa were quite close and thus comparable to the European countries but the gap has widened thereafter. The USA has generally experienced a continuous improvement in their productivity norms on an annual basis and this has been due partly to the improvement in the working tools of artisans. Another important factor is the poor quality of artisanship. The constructive effort being made by the South African government towards ensuring the sustainability of small and emerging contractors in employment-intensive construction is not in balance; the Contractor learnership programme of the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) must go hand-in- hand with an artisan learnership programme. Key words: baseline artisan productivity, task-group, work-study, construction, face & stock-bricks, plastering, painting and tiling.