Hit by Economic Downturn : S. Africa’s Jobless Whites Out of Luck, Opportunity

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Gideon Beukes’ luck ran out six months ago. The steel engineering company where he worked as a welder laid him off. The owner of the small agricultural plot on which he lived east of Johannesburg evicted him, his wife and four children because he could not pay the rent.

Beukes, 41, now has only odd jobs and small government welfare checks to feed his family, which has moved into an empty garage.

Each week, he pedals a battered bicycle more than 400 miles around the Johannesburg area, looking for work while saving bus fare. He often travels 50 or 60 miles on the bike to apply for a job he has heard about, only to find that it has already been filled, usually with a black worker who is paid half the $3.15 an hour that an experienced white welder would get.

Beukes’ daughter Maria, 15, who is more used to the sheltered life of Sundra, the small town where the family once lived, “has fallen in with a fast crowd of these city kids for whom booze, drugs and sex are big,” Beukes said the other day. She has run away from home, and her parents are heartsick with worry. Beukes has spent days searching Johannesburg for his daughter.

“I feel like my life has fallen apart, and I can’t seem to put it back together,” he said. “I’ve always been willing to try my luck and make a go of it, but my luck seems to have run out. I try not to be angry and bitter about it all, but it’s difficult, very difficult.”

His may seem to be “just another hard-luck story,” as Beukes says with a self-deprecating smile and a slight shrug, but it is one that is heard with increasing frequency and growing bitterness around South Africa’s major cities, where thousands of white workers have lost their jobs in the economic recession.

Soup kitchens, not seen in white communities here since the days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, are feeding hundreds of unemployed whites and their families every day around Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and other major cities.

High Unemployment

Long lines of job-seekers, mostly semiskilled workers from the construction industry, form daily outside the government’s manpower offices. The men hope for at least temporary jobs, but most go away disappointed. The lines are even longer on the days that unemployment benefits are distributed, and there are angry arguments when the benefits run out. To the surprise of officials, municipal governments have had scores of whites taking some of the $2.25-a-day jobs as manual laborers that were created to ease black unemployment.

Evicted from their homes, many poverty-stricken white families have moved, like the Beukeses, into empty garages, houses waiting for demolition and even abandoned buses and trucks. Just opposite Johannesburg’s municipal building, a dozen families are living in empty offices. Banks and other mortgage-holders are foreclosing on the homes of many unemployed whites, and applications for low-income municipal housing exceed vacancies by 15 to 1 in some cities.

Barefoot, flaxen-haired children of the unemployed go begging around the shopping centers of the working-class suburbs where they live, hoping for a can or two of food from shoppers or a few cents with which they can buy bread. Some come into downtown areas, shocking passers-by used to blacks begging but not whites.

Burglaries have increased markedly in many suburbs in recent months. Food is taken even more frequently than valuables. Supermarket managers tell of finding hungry children hidden in corners of the store, eating food taken from the shelves.

“We are in an economic, social and political crisis of alarming proportions as a result of this large-scale and rapidly growing white unemployment,” said Clive Derby-Lewis, director of the Johannesburg-based Stallard Foundation, a conservative study institute.

“We have hundreds, literally hundreds, of men losing their jobs every day, and we have poverty among whites now of the scope that we have not seen since the Great Depression more than 50 years ago. This is a horrific situation, and we can say, without exaggeration, that it threatens what is left of the country’s political and social stability, that it is not simply an economic problem. . . .

Sees a Hidden Crisis

“So far, this crisis is largely a hidden crisis, because the government is embarrassed by its failure to manage the economy well and because it knows that its own continued existence in office is threatened.”

The political implications of such widespread white poverty clearly transcend the suffering of the individual families.

The soup kitchens, unemployment lines and begging children painfully recall, particularly for the country’s Dutch-descended Afrikaners, the problem of “poor whites” in the 1920s and 1930s, when a commission sponsored by the Carnegie Corp. found that 17.5% of the white population, about 300,000 people, were “very poor.”

Many aspects of South Africa’s system of apartheid were intended to protect the “poor whites,” mostly Afrikaners who had been driven off their farms and into the cities where they had trouble competing for jobs. One of the National Party’s proudest boasts over the years has been its resolution of this problem.

“With the abandonment of almost everything that it once stood for, the National Party is recreating the problem of white poverty on a scale that never existed before,” said Louis Stofberg, a member of Parliament from the ultra-right Reconstituted National Party. The party wants a return to apartheid’s strict racial separation as well as its assertion of minority white rule with Afrikaner dominance.

“We are heading for an economic disaster under this government, a catastrophe way beyond the Great Depression. . . . Since the war, South Africa has not had such white unemployment as we have now, and the poverty we have begun to see is worse than anything in our history,” Stofberg said.

The withdrawal of dozens of American and West European companies from South Africa in recent months under mounting political pressure at home is certain to hasten this economic cataclysm, Stofberg argued, by depriving many key firms here of much of their access to foreign capital, technology, managerial know-how and export markets.

“The American and European companies all say, ‘Not to worry, all the jobs are safe,’ and maybe they are,” Stofberg said. “But saving today’s jobs is just the first step in dealing with this unemployment problem--who’s going to create tomorrow’s jobs? To me, that’s the real worry.”

For Stofberg’s party and other groups on the far right, the country’s severe economic problems not only prove what they call “the total incompetence” of the Nationalist government, but offer an opportunity for major political gains--perhaps not enough to oust the National Party but probably enough to thwart President Pieter W. Botha’s plans for modest but continuing reform of apartheid.

Unemployed whites already complain that blacks, who are paid a quarter to half of what white workers would earn, are hired by employers trying to keep costs down. They also resent the scrapping of government regulations that reserved certain jobs in most industries for whites. And they are angered that the government, for years the employer of last resort for whites, is not only trimming many positions to reduce the swollen bureaucracy but is hiring blacks, Indians and Coloreds (persons of mixed race) for jobs whites once held.

Competing With Blacks

“It is getting harder and harder for the white man to compete against the black in this country,” complained Sharon Denicker, whose husband has been out of work for a year. “The black will work for a fraction of what the white man requires because his housing costs are only a tenth of what ours are, because he pays no taxes, because he has subsidized transport and subsidized food. . . . The supermarkets, for example, will take on a black girl as a cashier rather than a woman like me who needs the job to feed her kids. This is just not fair.”

Blacks, for their part, resent unemployed whites taking the low-paid jobs, such as manual labor on public works projects, that they have come to regard as theirs. They also resent the substantially higher unemployment and welfare benefits whites get when out of work.

According to government employment statistics, there were fewer than 30,000 unemployed out of a white labor force of nearly 2 million in July, the last month for which figures have been released. But the Manpower Department in Pretoria reported that, a few months earlier, 188,000 whites were actively looking for work.

Figures Are Rising

Both figures have risen significantly, according to recent government statements, and applications for unemployment insurance benefits are reportedly coming in at a rate of 45,000 a month. New statistics will not be out for several months, and government officials refused requests for interviews on the growth of white unemployment and efforts to deal with it.

Whatever its true proportions, unemployment for whites is just a fraction of what it is for blacks, more than 2 million of whom--about 30% of the black labor force nationwide--are without jobs and only rarely receive unemployment compensation.

A better indication of the scope of white unemployment and its growth is the establishment over the last year of dozens of local welfare programs, particularly the soup kitchens that have sprung up around the industrial centers where unemployment is greatest.

“We only help the really hard up, and I am feeding, plus or minus, 240 children, 120 pensioners and maybe another 100 adults a day,” said Johanna Swanepoel, who runs a soup kitchen out of her small home in the hard-hit Jan Hofmeyr neighborhood on Johannesburg’s near west side.

“A family with five kids can get 500 or 600 rand (about $225 to $270) from welfare for the month, but at today’s prices that does not go very far at all,” she said. “We are all that stands between these families and starvation.”

The Dutch Reformed Church, to which most of the Afrikaners belong, says it is feeding 900 children a day in the Johannesburg area alone. The Pinkster Evangelical Church, which has parishes in several blue-collar suburbs around Johannesburg, estimates that it is feeding about 1,000 people in its soup kitchens as well as delivering food to 150 families.

In working-class suburbs on the city’s east side, the Jimmy O’Connor Welfare Service is directly helping 107 families and running a lunch program to feed children at 13 schools. State-run schools provide pupils in depressed areas around Transvaal province with free lunches, but government officials said the size of the program is secret and refused to give any information about it.

“We began our assistance after we heard stories about children at school fainting or falling over because they had not had breakfast or whose families have no food in their homes at all,” said Ronnie West, chairman of the Jimmy O’Connor group.

The Afrikaner Resistance Movement, better known for its far-right politics than welfare activities, began collecting surplus produce from farmers three months ago and estimates that it has already provided more than 500,000 meals in the Johannesburg and Pretoria areas and expects to provide at least 5 million by July.

Giel Groenewald, head of the group’s assistance efforts, said that many more whites, mostly Afrikaners, need help. “Some people are just too embarrassed or ashamed to ask for food,” Groenewald said. “Some are so ashamed that they don’t even want their ministers to know.”

“The problem is huge, simply huge,” said Rosa Hattingh, a relief coordinator for the Afrikaner Resistance Movement in Johannesburg’s southern suburbs. “From family to family, the story is the same--they have lost their jobs because of the economic recession and they can’t find another because the companies prefer to hire blacks for cheap labor. . . . So we have the bosses, big business and the banks exploiting both whites and blacks.”

The situation around Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Durban, the country’s other major industrial centers, is equally serious, according to welfare officials and relief groups there.

In the Cape Town area, for example, local governments are providing baskets of food to nearly 14,000 white families, probably about 80,000 people. In Port Elizabeth, probably the most economically depressed region in the country--unemployment among whites is estimated at three to four times the national average and at 60% among blacks--a church worker said, “We don’t know how many are on relief or welfare or charity because there are just too many to count.”

‘Situation Getting Worse’

“People are really hurting, and the situation is getting worse,” the Port Elizabeth church worker said, asking not to be quoted by name. “There has been less and less work, especially in the construction industry, the automotive industry, a lot of heavy industries, over the past year, and when there is a job going there are 50 or 60 white applicants and five times that many blacks for it.”

A bitter envy of blacks, as well as an ignorance of their real circumstances, colors the conversation of the unemployed whites, who see blacks not only as rivals for scarce jobs but as being rewarded by the government for the country’s continuing civil unrest.

“Blacks live fantastically, far better than we do,” Sharon Denicker said in the sparsely furnished living room of her small but comfortable city-owned row house, which is perhaps twice the size of the average home in one of Johannesburg’s black ghettos for a quarter the number of people at roughly the same price per square foot.

“The only blacks who’ve got problems are those who drink too much,” she said. “The husbands get jobs as cheap labor, the women can work as maids and the whites subsidize everything.”

Clive Derby-Lewis sees such rivalry “growing inevitably into serious racial conflict, with both sides using arms,” unless the country is partitioned, as the Conservative Party and other groups on the far right advocate, into black and white homelands.

“The sheer numbers of the blacks in South Africa mean that this problem of white unemployment, and thus of white poverty, is just beginning,” he said. “Blacks are pouring out of the rural areas in search of urban jobs. Big business and the banks are only too happy to exploit their cheap labor, and so the gulf between the super-rich and the poor is deepening and threatening any hope we have of re-establishing stability. . . . Even this government should realize that the solution to black poverty is not white poverty.”

Times researcher Michael Cadman also contributed to this story.