Beyond the Income: The Normative Effects of Unemployment in the Goldfields of Welkom, Free State, South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT “Beyond the income” puts emphasis on the need to go beyond income loss to understand the meaning of wage labour, and the effects that unemployment and inequality have on people. This ethnographic and in-depth interview-based research focused on the experiences of unemployment among South African black men—ex-mine workers in their fifties and sixties who had worked on the Welkom goldfields—and found that they suffered three types of loss: economic loss, psychological harm and social exclusion. These findings illustrate that, while income loss is crucially important for workers globally, unemployment has far-reaching effects other than income loss. Income loss interconnects with other types of loss (psychological and social). E. Durkheim (1964, The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press) and G. Therborn (2013, The Killing Fields of Inequality. Wiley) foreground the importance of taking into consideration income loss, but they also demonstrate the need for approaches that take into consideration anomie and existential inequality to understand that unemployment has greater effects on its victims than only income loss. The research has relevance for the debates on basic income grants. Because the loss involved in unemployment is greater than income loss, ex-mine workers’ loss cannot be solved only by the income support offered through a basic income grant. The basic income grant would only go to the extent of responding to income loss, but it would be limited in relation to the normative aspects that were fulfilled by wage labour. The paper concludes by suggesting that going beyond the income broadens our understanding of the effects of wage labour, unemployment, and inequality, and that this understanding should inform research, policy (social and economic), and movement building.