Page 26 - DPSA - Service Delivery Report

FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
immediate needs and rights and not on what is best for the country as a whole over the longer term.
We call the scenario demand and control, because it describes what happens. There is a constant tug of war between government wanting to control (they design plans for society and individuals) and what those indi- viduals demand based on what they deem themselves to be entitled to. But, as a nation, we are succeeding in developing the appropriate skills. Our people are able to work and earn a liv- able wage, mostly in permanent jobs in the designated industries, under the guidance of a descriptive and direc- tive government. Collective bargaining now happens between government and a newly formed coalition of busi- ness, labour and the community.
In the missing the mark (for now) scenario, we did not see a great change in time for 2030. However, the structures and environment are a lot more enabling than what it was in 2019 and we believe that we will see the benefits as a result of the enabling environment being in place and our people operating from a true sense of empowerment. If only we realised sooner that our skills development ini- tiatives were stuck in the past.
Accomplished game changers are accomplished because they have the appropriate, in-demand skills, and they are game changers because as empowered people, they change the rules of the game – they change the labour market for the better. In 2030, empowered people – women and men – with the right skills are active agents of change.
Concluding remarks
This research project highlighted a number of insights:
 The reality is that we are competing against international providers that have access to low-cost, produc- tive labour and locally, our people will increasingly ‘compete against’ robots, automated systems, and machines that learn and are able to perform the same activities with higher efficiency and at lower cost.
 Education needs a total ‘facelift’; the entire education environment, from pre-school to postgraduate education, needs to be re-imagined and aligned with emerging skills re- quirements. Life-long learning must become an imperative; not simply a ‘nice-to-have’.
 We should not steer ourselves to- ward a situation that pegs people against robots, automated sys- tems, and machines that learn, but rather one that works toward peo- ple working with new technologies.
 Leaders on all levels of society should engage with their people to facilitate understanding and share knowledge and insights about emerging opportunities and poten- tial threats.
 The outcomes and insights gained from this research resonates with the three pillars of recommenda- tions in the ILO Global Commis- sion on the Futures of Work report, namely investing in the capabilities of people, investing in the institu- tions of the world of work and in- vesting in decent, sustainable work.
A number of non-negotiable truths exist:
The 4IR is a given.
• Production could happen without people. This implies the potential substitutability of smart robots and artificial intelligence for human be- ings in the labour force in the prima- ry, secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy.
• Economic growth is not the pana- cea to job creation.
• The growing democratisation of the workplace presents the firm pos- sibility that full-time employment contracts might, in some instances, give way to less formal, gig-econo- my workplace agreements.
Given the above, the labour land- scape, in the event of inappropriate skills and entitlement will be very un- favourable for the majority of workers in South Africa and they will indeed run the risk of being replaced by robots, automated systems and machines that learn. That said, we do have a young population creating the opportunity for a demographic dividend which will probably only be fully exploited in the event of appropriate skills develop- ment and a growing sense of empow- erment. In this kind of scenario, labour is augmented by 4IR artifacts and in- creased production creates more jobs. It should be noted that, in the short run, a number of jobs may be destroyed; in the longer run, however, new job fam- ilies are likely to be created. This is a typical manifestation of the process of creative destruction.
One of the key imperatives to both escape the dead-end scenario and to achieve the accomplished game changers scenario is a total re-haul of the education/training/skilling system. Here all stakeholders have roles to play.
The National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) should play a leading, coordinating, orches- trating, integrating role in engaging all the relevant stakeholders, and a social labour market compact should be facil- itated. The trade-off between efficien- cy and equity should be taken into ac- count; decision-makers should explore the trade-offs and design policies and procedures that both acknowledge that trade-offs exist and reward efforts to mitigate job losses, reduce poverty and narrow income inequality.
All four of the scenarios that were gen- erated as part of this research, are plausible. The preferable scenario is that of the accomplished game chang- ers and, in the words of President Cyril Ramaphosa during his address at the launch of the ILO Global Commission on the Futures of Work report: “... we are optimistic that with the right ap- proach, an approach that is proactive and inclusive, we can achieve what we set out to”.
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If we continue on our current path, South Africa’s economy and her people may suffer greatly.
We are in a position to gain from a demographic dividend, but only if our working age population have the appropriate skills.
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SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW | Volume 12 No.3 of 2019