Office of Public Works

One area that has stood out, though, is the social sector of the programme, which has provided an average of 165 work days for each person, well above the infrastructure sector's 51 days. It's infrastructure that most people probably think of when they think public works - roads and the like.

This does account for more than half the jobs but SA's public works programme also includes activities such as home-based care for people with AIDS and for frail and elderly people.

Getting these social programmes up and running has been complicated and success has been mixed but they have provided more than 100000 opportunities, of longer duration and at lower cost than in other sectors. The need is certainly there, and the idea is to expand this part of the programme.

The government is keen too to expand the "environmental" sector, particularly in waste management. This involves paying unemployed people to collect garbage for municipalities, particularly poorer ones. It's essentially a form of outsourcing by local authorities that might not be able to afford the services of full-time workers. Again, there's the question of whether the EPWP is being used to bypass formal job creation in the public sector.

THE short but compelling answer is that after last year's public sector strike, the minimum pay in the public service, including benefits, is now R60000 a year. That's well above the national average and more than five times the R50 a day (or about R12000 a year) that would be fairly standard EPWP pay. Chances are that those childcare jobs simply wouldn't be created at all if they had to be created at market-based rates, in the formal sector.

Heavily unionised as it is, the state has, essentially, priced itself out of the market for low-skilled labour.

The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has estimated that while employment in the public service contracted 9% between 1995 and 2005, the decline in low skilled jobs was 34%, while it was only 4% among higher skilled nurses and teachers.

SA's civil service is small by international standards, accounting for less than 10% of the workforce, and it could and should play a role in expanding employment, to complement private sector job creation and enhance service delivery. But that's not going to be unskilled without the creation of a new lower wage grade. There is talk of creating a "grade zero" and trade unions seem willing to discuss it. That could open the way for new types of public sector jobs.

But SA's unemployment problem is so large that it needs to maximise job creation from all sources, private and public. And that includes boosting public works programmes. "Grade zero" wouldn't remove the need for a lot more public works chances for the unemployed, and there would still be a tradeoff between the pay level and the number of opportunities the government could afford to create.

The HRSC's employment scenarios project estimates that in a middle-road scenario, with average economic growth of 4,5%, the government would need to create about 1,5-million EPWP jobs, at a cost of R25bn, in order to halve unemployment by 2014. Whether SA should be spending that much on public works, as opposed to supporting job creation in other ways, is one of the questions the designers of the next phase of the EPWP have to tackle.

Joffe is senior associate editor.