By Mashilo Mnisi
It’s always elating commemorating our milestone achievements like most significant holidays in South Africa. But Worker’s Day or May Day in this country has become a hollow ritual. We watch, with weary eyes, as government representatives and the presidency descend upon the masses to engage ‘workers’ — or more accurately, the ‘employed’ — with a recycled litany of promises.
They speak of improved environments and better emoluments, but their rhetoric is a mask for a bitter reality: they are negotiating the terms of a better pittance, not a better life.
For the South African worker, nothing ever shifts toward the light. Instead, we see the deliberate fomenting of a crisis where the labourer is left to suffocate under the crushing weight of unending debt. This is not progress; it is neo-slavery. It is a modern bondage, peculiar and tragic, but it is espoused and celebrated within the African context by the very same people who once felt the lash of historical chains.
We have traded the physical shackle for a financial one, and we call it ‘opportunity’ – with the ‘employed’ kept in the same cycle of debt and poverty. The crisis deepens when we turn to our youth. Our university graduates emerge from the gates of academia clutching degrees, fuelled by the fading hope of entry into a labour market that is not expanding, but contracting.
In the unforgiving landscape of South Africa, existing without an income is not viewed as a misfortune — it is treated as a crime. Financial independence has been elevated to the sole metric of human worth. Without a pay at the end of the day, you are stripped of your personhood; you become a ‘nobody’ in the eyes of the world and, most painfully, within the walls of your own home.
Your ideas are dismissed, your voice is silenced, and your presence is tolerated only as a disappointment. You’re no longer called as that ‘big sister’, ‘uncle’, ‘big brother’, ‘daughter’, but by your name with a sneer.
To address the jagged cruelty of the family unit that turns predatory when a graduate is jobless, we must teach graduates that the cum laude they schlepped at ‘varsity’ isn’t necessarily a ticket to employment, but deep networking and connections also are. There’s a psychological violence in being pressured to find a job when the economy offers none.
When your own kin — those who should be your fortress — begin to treat you as a financial parasite, the betrayal is absolute. To be threatened with the streets by those who shared your blood is the ultimate erosion of dignity. We are not just facing an unemployment crisis; we are facing a moral collapse where the lack of a salary is used as a license for domestic abuse. We must demand a society where our humanity is not tied to a pay slip, or we shall all surely perish.
