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By Gavin Chait, on 02 May 2007

Hawker's of the world ... get lost
Hawker's of the world ... get lost
Moral outrage is bigotry with a halo.  And the moral citizens of our cities are whiffling about the high-streets breathing fire and brimstone, “Something! must be done!”  And done quickly or there will be letter writing and waving of forefingers.

A simple symptom of poverty in any developing country is that labour, which is mobile, moves from areas where there are no jobs to other areas where there are still no jobs but there are lots of other people as well.  This means that people turn up in our cities in droves doing anything they can to try and earn a living.  When they can’t earn a living, some turn to crime.

But the refined, rarefied noses of those with nice jobs rebels at the sight of poor people running stalls on the streets of their nice clean cities.  However, special venom is reserved for the informal parking attendants and street hawkers.  And so the streets are regularly subjected to military-style purges as tables and goods and people are loaded up into vans and “taken away”.  Parking attendants can be subjected to a six-month trial before facing a fine.

Wonderful, isn’t it?  A person who is so poor that they are forced to stand in the street for a few Rand a day is now going to face a fine which would cripple him.  But, cry the rich, why don’t they get a job?

A poll a few years ago by KFM, a Cape Town-based radio station, showed that 90% of people want “them” off the streets.  A representative of the unicity was duly called on stage to explain what was going to be done.  “Well, we’re going to pass a law to ban all activity.”  The song that followed was Bruce Hornsby’s telling “The way it is” which features the line, “There’s a lot that don’t change in another man’s mind when all they can see at the hiring time is the line on the colour bar.”  I don’t think anyone spotted the irony.  The attitude seems to be that “these people” could get “real” jobs if they wanted but they enjoy putting our tempers in a huff.

This type of conflict is normal for a country in transition.  Industrialising England of Charles Dickens’ time held the same horrors for the rich as improved farming methods and land enclosure forced poor, uneducated people out of the country and into the cities.  The responses there were somewhat worse than here – debtors goal, exile to Australia, torture.  We reserve this behaviour for refugees from our neighbours further North.

It’s very easy standing in the middle of one of our genteel suburbs to imagine that the whole country lives this way and forget the teaming, thriving, exciting, dangerous townships just over the horizon.  It’s easy to slip into that colonial nostalgia where the poor could be isolated in their own places and pushed back there when not needed.

We have tried this before, sweeping the streets clean of traders under the guise of reducing crime.  Instead crime goes up as the criminals take over unobserved.

We may object to informal workers as being unsightly but they are real people finding honourable solutions to devastating problems.  People only obey the laws that make sense to them.

You are breaking as many laws and putting the lives of others in danger when you speak on your cellphone while driving.  But you don’t seem to care.  Do you honestly believe that you will stop informal traders by legislating against them?

We all seem to choose the laws we will break based on how the law effects our lifestyle.  Smoking in public, not paying your TV licence, these are the laws the rich break and laugh about.  The poor are going to break any laws that prevent them from earning an honest living.

   
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Keywords : informal sector, hawkers, car guards, poverty, self-employment


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By: Twylite on 03 May 2007

You "advise investors and companies on understanding the informal economy" and yet you publish this nonsense? 
 
First, hawkers and car guards are very different. Try not to confuse them. Hawkers run a retail business, card guards offer a service. 
 
The outrage over hawkers should be obvious: without control, hawkers cost jobs and damage the economy. They pay R0.00 to set up on a pavement outside a legitimate retail business (which pays rent and employs a number of staff), and obscure or obstruct the business frontage and entrance, causing financial damage to that business. 
 
This is why most cities have designated areas on pavements for controlled trading, where hawkers with the appropriate license can trade legitimately. 
 
Car guards by comparison provide a service even if you don't request it (negative option marketing), and can become obstructive if you don't pay them. Sometimes they are actually providing a valuable service, but most often they are a nuisance, getting in the way of moving vehicles. 
 
Hawking and car attending are real jobs, but they are subject to regulations like any other real job. I can't set up a business on public property, nor can I practice in the security industry without training and union affiliation. 
 
These laws are there to ensure a working social and economic system. The fact that the most impoverished in our society have trouble clearing these hurdles is a problem that must be addressed, but mischaracterising the problem as "the refined, rarefied noses of those with nice jobs" doesn't help anyone. 
 
The informal economy is not driven by individuals eking out a living. There is no growth there. It is driven by wealthy individuals who start small businesses and create employment and further wealth. The sooner we learn to value wealth as a creator of wealth, the sooner we will discover how to address the problems of poverty.

 

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By: Gavin Chait on 03 May 2007

You sound morally outraged. And you also sound as if you are unable to appreciate that we have two overlapping, and occasionally blurred, economies in South Africa. 
 
There is plenty of wealth in the informal economy - which is why it exists. All the laws that you mention are expensive and the very barriers to entry that attract traders into the informal market. Consumers who support street traders know that they offer no guarantees - which is why retailers are still growing quite convincingly even with hawkers on the streets outside selling similar goods. That hawkers are still able to compete shows that they have some competitive advantages. And trust me - with the aggressiveness of city officials - all street hawkers pay something. 
 
If our informal sector was Zimbabwe - a sovereign state - would you be so eager to demand of them that they must first obey our laws and standards before we invest? Or do you think that, in investing, they would gradually adopt our laws and standards as they can afford them? 
 
First we must address our attitude to the informal sector, then we must create bridges which allow legal investment back and forth across the two markets. Only then will we "discover how to address the problems of poverty".

 

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By: Michael on 03 May 2007

All very valid points and sentiment though I'd like a distinction to be made between informal traders and car guards. It's a blurry line I know, but for me there is justification through at least the pretence of value creation that hawkers and street vendors have a far stronger claim to in my view. 
 
Additionally I would like to know more about the economics of either of these practices. I have long suspected (though never proved) that both car guards and street vendors are subject to similar structures of "ownership" to those that exist in the formal economy. By this I mean that they are ruled over by "landlords" who dictate the nature of much of their working environment and ultimately levy significant "taxes". This results in the majority of the realtive wealth generated ending up in the hands of a few who have no contestable right to those proceeds. Suddenly I feel like I'm reading Levitt and he's analysing the economics of the crack trade in Detroit. It is this informal power struggle that seems a hotbed for dangerous crime to me and, if the structures I describe are in existence, would justify the active policing of both prcatices. 
 
Similarly, the above holding true, there is very little to then suggest that engagement in informal trading holds any prospect for future upliftment. While I don't expect desperate individuals to resort to anything else, surely the institutions that shape public policy have to take a longer term view. I don't profess to know the answer, it's likely not to be left to market forces, perhaps some sort of new deal arrangement and tighter border controls? 
 
I'd be interested to hear your views on this, my ivory tower may be a priveliged one, but it has also afforded me a view that lets me not wish to see others pursue paths with little long term benefit, which is after all what we should want

 

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By: Gavin Chait on 04 May 2007

Watch this space, we're actually busy with a survey in both Johannesburg and Cape Town on precisely these issues. 
 
Previous experience is that there is no line between car guarding and trading. What seems to happen is that people become car guards, save up to purchase stock, and then start trading. A group of Kenyans I met in Cape Town had done so well out of trading that they bought a small building and turned it into a budget hotel for migrants. Clearly it doesn't happen for everyone, but it is an important example of what is possible. 
 
We should be complete on the survey by end-May and the results will be posted here.

 

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By: Michael on 04 May 2007

I look forward to the results

 

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