.png)
NEIL AGGETT LABOUR STUDIES UNIT (NALSU): Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture
Andrew Murray, "Why has South Africa's Industrial Policy Failed to Halt Deindustrialisation and Transform the Economy?"
SEMINAR & WEBINAR: 4PM, Tuesday 14 November 2023 at Graham Hotel, 123 High Street, Makhanda, South Africa & via Zoom (details below).
ALL WELCOME
This Lecture examines the evolution of industrial policy in South Africa, and what can be done to save the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing has fallen from 19.3% of GDP in 1994 to just 11.8% in 2019, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Employment in textiles, leather products, footwear and clothing fell 50% from 2000 to 2019. The remnants of these former mainstays of the Eastern Cape are rustbelts, gutted factories and stranded working-classes. Factories had been built within the framework of import-substitution, but were not globally competitive; the country remained dependent on raw material exports. With the neo-liberal turn in the 1990s, protective tariffs fell from 28% in 1990 to 8.2% in 15 years. Factories and jobs were washed away by cheap imports.
Andrew Murray focuses on the policies that were intended to revive local industry from the 2000s, starting with the National Industrial Policy Framework (NIPF) and the Industrial Policy Action Plans (IPAPs), and moving into the more recent Reimagined Industrial Strategy and sector masterplans. Looking especially at the Eastern Cape, he evaluates these policies and examines the impact of state capacity. The Lecture closes with a consideration of what needs to be done to build a coordinated and technically capable state that can build a future fit economy, and negotiate reciprocal conditionalities and trade-offs with the private sector and other stakeholders.
SPEAKER: Andrew Murray works as an independent analyst and policy advisor. He was team lead on the recent Department of Trade, Industry and Competition's industrialisation and localisation study of 44 districts and 8 metros, to better align industrial policy instruments with local industrialization opportunities. He has worked with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (NUMSA), and the National Union of Namibian Workers. He was head of research, and then CEO, of the Eastern Cape Socio-Economic Consultative Council (ECSECC), and has worked at universities in Namibia and South Africa.
JOINING ONLINE: If you are attending this blended event online, please register in advance at:
HOSTS: The Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) hosts the Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture as part of its programme of labour studies seminars and the annual Vuyisile Mini Workers School, in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and Economics & Economic History, at Rhodes University, South Africa, and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, NALSU is engaged in policy, research and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.