ILO AGAINST SHARP WAGE GAPS AMONG WORKERS

Despite proven wage growth in African countries, workers’ incomes keep shrinking, resulting in social unrest, an International Labour Organisation (ILO) report says.

According to the report from the ILO office in Dar es Salaam, the disparity between proven wage growth and shrinking share of the national income for the 2012/2013 period was attributable to “… public dissatisfaction and increasing risk of social unrest in Africa.”

The ILO report made available to The Guardian warns that “declining workers’ share of the national income has affected perceptions of what is fair, particularly given the huge payments some company executives have been getting.”

It attributes the findings to an ILO Global Wage Report 2012/13.

“Wages represent the main source of income for Africans to support their families. The level of wages, therefore, has a direct impact on the well-being, education and security of African families and communities,” the report says in part, adding:

“In sub-Saharan Africa, the share of wage employment has recently been showing fair growth. While many countries, including Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda, have recorded relatively modest increases in the share of wage earners, countries like Namibia, Rwanda and South Africa managed to register significant progress.”

It further says that in 2010, real average wages increased by nearly 10 per cent in South Africa, where wage growth remained unequally distributed in various sectors, according to government figures.

Despite this progress, wage employment in sub-Saharan Africa remains a relatively small part of the total paid employment jobs. For the 2010/2011 period, the number of wage earners in the continent amounted to more than 100 million – a significant amount in absolute terms, notes the report.

It further said that the proportion of wage earners among women workers also remained disconcertingly lower than men.

Although higher labour productivity resulted in positive wage growth in Africa, the nature of informal economies poses challenges in measuring the accurate status of wages and that this could result in the projection of an overly optimistic picture of wage trends.

“Data on the evolution of average wages in Africa were relatively scarce and only a few countries in Africa, including Botswana, Egypt, Lesotho, Mauritius, South Africa and Uganda, carried out quarterly or annual establishment surveys in order to measure the evolution of earnings” it says, adding:

“In most countries wage data are best collected through labour force surveys that are implemented at irregular intervals and are not always comparable across years.”