Transform not Reform.

Strategic Meeting to Advance National Strategy for universal Basic Income and Recognition of the Care Economy as first step to building a Feminist Economy.

Context:

Even prior to the impact of Covid- 19 and the rolling lockdowns on South Africa, our economy was in recession, with unemployment, poverty and inequalities collapsing in a triage of slow but savage implosion.

Since the first lockdown we have seen heightened economic and social marginalisation of the poor and women as recovery plans and stimulus packages focus on maintaining the pre-Covid norm. The window for using the crisis to disrupt structural faults was never seriously seized.

During early lockdown, in April 2020, the President’s address recognised two critical facts: working age adults urgently require income support to survive, and that the existence and well-being of women in South Africa is and will continue to be under severe and constant attack in all spaces and dimensions including both social and economic.

The Fundamental Rights to Equality, Dignity and Life and the Bill of Rights.

The South African Constitution guarantees to all the inalienable rights to equality before the law, dignity and life. The Bill of Rights also guarantees rights of access to a variety of justiciable socio-economic rights, including the rights to sufficient food and social assistance. The SERs are subject to an internal limitation that directs the state to progressively realise (fulfil) these rights subject to is available resources. 2015 ratification by the SA state of the UN International Covenant on Social and Cultural Rights introduces the higher standard of ‘Maximum Available Resources’. This covenant has however not been domesticated.

The Grootboom and TAC constitutional court judgements set out and confirm the dismissal of the SA courts to adopt the Committee of Economic Social and Cultural Rights of the need for the state to adopt a minimum core for each right. Instead, the provisions made for access to the enjoyment of each right will be reviewed against a standard of reasonableness. While the courts will not determine the details of any policy or plan of government, it is vital for such plan to past the reasonableness test that it makes immediate provision for access to the most vulnerable.

Access to Social Security in South Africa.

The Social Assistance Act of 2004 makes provision for categorical access to social assistance (the tax funded grants that form part of social security). These are all means tested and include: children under 18, older people from age 60, children and adults living with disabilities. There is no category of access to social grants for able bodied working age adults, however poor they may be. This flies in the face of the constitutional right of access to social assistance to all unable to provide for themselves and their dependents (Section 27(1)(c)). The one exception to this is the provision of access to Social Relief of Distress. This has always been a discretional grant, previously linked to natural disasters and personal catastrophe. Eligibility is determined by the suffering of financial distress due to the occurrence of an exogenous event. Fires, floods and imprisonment of a breadwinner summarise the spectrum of such events from the societal to the personal.

The clear gap is vulnerable people between the ages of 18 and 59 who are permanently destitute.

The question to be addressed in any challenge is: identification of category (of most vulnerable). In a situation that we have right now with rampant unemployment for women and men of all ages across all provinces, what would the best pragmatic, category of “most vulnerable” be that would be a clear winner for a challenge, leading to an incremental progressive roll out towards universal access, such as through a Basic Income Grant.

Placing Women at the Centre of the Economy.

While formal unemployment of women lags that of men in terms of employment rates as well as quality of work, millions of women are employed in unrecognised and unpaid care work, that is responsible for the entire social reproduction.

Globally there is advanced work on the need for, and benefits of, recognising care work and in effect placing women at the heart of the economy.

Transform, not reform.

What lies at the heart of both these initiatives is the desire to see the disruption and transformation of the current exclusionary design of neo-liberal trickle-down economics that despite weathering the 2008 financial crisis is a bit weathered right now as the best economic design for post Covid rebuild, The global recognition of the damaging impact of multiple dimensions of inequality, the failure of private- public partnerships to embrace the need for green transition reforms in the face of a damaged and changing planet, as well as the untold social and labour market changes and permutations that the 4^th Industrial Revolution suggests to many are clear markers that what we need are structural transformations and not superficial reforms.

Change Campaign

SPII would like to convene a two to three hour virtual meeting on 19 July 2021. The objective of this meeting would be to establish a broad social justice coalition that would own and forge a successful trio of strategies to kick start this change. From this meeting we would like to see three strategy task teams emerging, Campaigns, Litigation and Lobbying.

Our initial thinking was focussed on the critical need for universal access to social assistance through a BIG. However as we reflected the magnitude of the change needed emerged, as is captured above. Already a variety of voices have grown the demand for a BIG, and for a feminist understanding of the care economy. We think it time to consider whether these two fit together in some way, and whether it is strategic at this stage to move them forwards together.

Strategic Meeting:

Date and Time: Friday 16 July 10 am to 12 pm.

Platform: Zoom

Participants: 15 to 20 members of PILG organisations, SJOs, and Social Movements as well as Trade Unions and faith-based organisations.

Meeting Format:

A plenary presentation of where we are in terms of poverty and unemployment and inequality and the emerging thumbprint of Covid- 19 on social and economic shaping. Discussions, capturing of areas of consensus, dissent.

Break away sessions:

Three sessions to work on parameters for campaign strategy (mobilising, media, research and messaging, political education), litigation strategy (identify approach and sequencing, research and other needs) and stakeholder analysis and lobbying strategy. Click here to view the invite

For the full presentation, click 2021-07-16 BIG Duma Gqubule