Liepollo Pheko tells The Mint how the digital economy offers opportunities to young South Africans but security may not be one of them.
Digital jobs promise a way out of South Africa’s employment crisis. Liepollo Pheko, a South African academic, tells The Mint why workers need more than an internet connection to take control of their future.
For a young South African trying to earn a living, the digital economy comes with an enticing sales pitch. Work from anywhere. Be your own boss. Sell your skills to the world. When conventional employment is scarce, an internet connection can look like a route around an economy that has failed to make room for you.
A livelihood assembled from occasional tasks may keep someone fed without providing the stability needed to plan, train or move into better work.
Liepollo Pheko understands the attraction. Speaking to The Mint, she describes a young population with considerable potential, but too many people struggling to find a secure livelihood. The promise of digital jobs, she says, is “politically and socially persuasive”. Persuasive, however, is no guarantee of secure work.
Before considering what artificial intelligence might deliver, Pheko wants to question what counts as employment. The familiar picture of a worker spending decades on a factory payroll bears little resemblance to the lives of people selling goods, washing clothes, tending gardens or fixing cars whenever an opportunity appears.
“There’s a difference between having an income, you know, sustaining yourself and being in registered, nine-to-five work,” she says.
These activities sustain people, even when they sit awkwardly within official accounts of the economy. Recognising them means taking their insecurity seriously. A livelihood assembled from occasional tasks may keep someone fed without providing the stability needed to plan, train or move into better work.
Even seeking a job costs money: transport to an interview, a phone call, a printed CV. Pheko sees the debate over a basic income or social wage as a question of the state’s obligations to people facing structural barriers. Treating support as charity obscures the circumstances that make it necessary.
Everybody’s a content creator now.
For Pheko, this is part of a social contract. People have not necessarily fallen outside formal employment because they lack ambition or refuse to work. Asking them to acquire new skills cannot resolve every obstacle between their existing circumstances and a dependable income. Any account of the opportunities offered by technology needs to begin with the resources people have to reach them.
Against this background, platform work offers flexibility and the possibility of putting creative or technical abilities to use. Design a poster, write a report, produce an advertising campaign. Young people have been encouraged to see science, technology and digital skills as their future. “Everybody’s a content creator now,” Pheko observes.
But the interview quickly reaches an uncomfortable question. If a customer can ask AI to generate the poster or presentation directly, where does that leave the person who hoped to earn money making it? The technology advertised as an opening may also undercut the work available through it.
Pheko is emphatic that describing the sales pitch does not mean endorsing it. “I’m not a purveyor of the idea that AI is the future and the future of employment and the future for young people.”
There is human labour behind the apparent magic. Knowledge has been produced, books written, images assessed and content moderated. The polished output on a customer’s screen can conceal the people whose contributions made it possible. Their presence, though, does not establish that the resulting jobs will be rewarding or secure.
<blockquote>Virtual work actually makes corporate control much more immediate while making the accountability much more distant.</blockquote>
But someone displaced from design work might instead find themselves labelling material to train AI. Such work could help improve the very systems competing with their skills. The question becomes who benefits from that improvement, and what bargaining power the worker retains.
For Pheko, the attraction of automation to employers is revealing. She describes the prospect of virtual workers “who don’t talk back, who don’t ask for a salary increase”. Human needs become costs to eliminate rather than conditions around which work should be organised.
The problems extend beyond outright replacement. A driver or delivery worker may still do a physical job while dealing with a platform whose decisions are difficult to challenge. When something goes wrong, the route to redress can dissolve into a remote helpline or an automated response.
“Virtual work actually makes corporate control much more immediate while making the accountability much more distant,” Pheko says.
That is the heart of her critique. A company can exercise close control over someone’s working life while becoming elusive when that person needs an explanation or remedy. Rights written into legislation mean little if workers cannot identify who is responsible or secure a hearing.
Flexibility should not depend on surrendering the ability to challenge an employer.
Her proposals are practical: identifiable companies, enforceable minimum pay, recognition of unpaid work, explanations for decisions and access to a human appeal. Workers also need protection for collective organising across platforms. Flexibility should not depend on surrendering the ability to challenge an employer.
The politics of digital work also reaches beyond the workplace. Pheko connects it to South Africa’s exposure to decisions made elsewhere, including changes in US trade policy. Depending on an external power can leave a country vulnerable when the terms of access suddenly change.
“We should really ask the same question around even digital infrastructure,” she says: “who controls the access and sets the prices”.
She sees possibilities in stronger relationships within Africa and broader international partnerships. Trade, technical training and regional computing capacity could give countries more options. Yet she is cautious about expecting alliances such as BRICS to improve labour conditions, given the records of some members.
Nor does she want another choice imposed between rival blocs. Diversifying relationships takes time, and economic independence requires more than choosing a different powerful partner. The aim is to increase the room available to determine priorities and pursue them.
Despite the risks, Pheko finds reasons for optimism in South Africa’s own capabilities: science and innovation, industrial policies with unrealised potential, artisanal production and a vibrant creative sector. She is excited by people making distinctive work and asserting ownership over it. “Continue to be creative, continue to be assertive,” she urges.
Her optimism rests on that capacity to act. The test for digital development is whether it helps people build livelihoods they can sustain and influence. A promise of jobs is only a beginning. What matters is the power people have once they take them.
