White conservative groups continue to claim exclusion, while the labour market keeps white workers at the summit of earnings and security.
The Democratic Alliance (DA)’s challenge to employment equity law carries that politics straight into the government of national unity (GNU) period and gives white grievance an official platform. Meanwhile, the Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) median earnings table strips that fiction bare.
White workers take home a median of R25 000 a month. Indian or Asian workers take home R15 000. Coloured workers take home R6 067. Black African workers take home R5 200. White workers therefore earn 380.8% more than black African workers on the median measure. Indian or Asian workers earn 188.5% more and coloured workers earn 16.7% more.
The median captures the ordinary worker rather than the executive fringe, which gives these figures real political weight in South Africa’s wage debate. On Workers’ Day 2026, the typical white worker still stands far above the typical black African worker in a labour market built through conquest, land theft and racial rule.
This devastation is rooted in history. White settlers who pushed into the hinterland in the 18th century wanted land, cattle, water and labour and they directed the harshest force of conquest against large African agrarian and pastoral communities of the eastern and interior regions, especially Nguni-speaking formations.
Colonial administrations then used taxation to destroy African autonomy and force labour into the settler economy. A fiscal history of South Africa records hut taxes, poll taxes, dog taxes and road taxes imposed on Africans to compel cash dependence and migrant labour.
The Glen Grey regime intensified that coercion and deepened the assault on African agrarian independence. White accumulation rested on African ruination from the beginning. Railways, mines, ports, farms and food chains all emerged from the foundation of black African exploitation by white settlers.
The 1913 Natives Land Act widened that assault at national level. Government centenary material records that the Act limited African landholding to seven percent of the land, later 13%, restricted black people from buying or occupying land except as employees of a white master and opened the door to white ownership of 87% of the land.
The Act attacked an indigenous economy and deepened a labour system already built through coercion. The indigenous majority moved further into dispossession, labour tenancy and wage dependence. The monthly gap between R25 000 and R5 200 records the survival of that structure in the present.
The unemployment figures place the same history in the present tense. Black Africans made up more than 80% of the working-age population between 2019 and 2024, yet they accounted for more than 91% of the unemployed in 2024. June 2024 figures place official unemployment at 37.6% for black Africans, 23.3% for coloured people, 13.9% for Indian or Asian people and 7.9% for white people.
A wider measure of exclusion cuts deeper still. Stats SA’s June 2024 labour tables recorded 12.668 million employed black Africans, 7.632 million unemployed and 13.567 million outside the labour force from a total working-age population of 33.867 million. More than six in 10 working-age black Africans therefore stood either unemployed or outside the labour force, while only 37.4% were employed. The black majority carries the central burden. Coloured communities carry the next heaviest burden in the graded racial order that white supremacy built.
Median earnings give that hierarchy its most concrete form. A median of R25 000 and R5 200 describes two different social worlds. Monthly income determines the quality of food in the home, the ability to travel to work, the margin against debt, the chance to study further, the possibility of rest and the capacity to survive a crisis without humiliation.
Coloured workers sit above black Africans in the median table, yet the distance between R6 067 and R25 000 shows how the racial order graded oppression rather than equalised it. Indian or Asian workers occupy a higher rung. White workers remain at the summit.
The same order appears in occupational hierarchy and formal-sector access. White workers held 61.6% of their employment in skilled occupations in 2024, while black Africans held 17.6%. White workers also held 90.6% of their employment in the formal sector, while black Africans held 64.0% and recorded the largest shares in informal work.
Coloured workers again stood closer to black Africans than to whites. Stats SA’s occupational medians show the material return attached to that hierarchy. Skilled work carried a median monthly income of R23 000 in 2024; semi-skilled work R6 500; and low-skilled work R3 800. Managers and professionals each recorded R25 000, while technicians recorded R20 000.
The late Sampie Terreblanche explains the continuation of this malaise after so-called liberation. He argued that the handover protected the old white elite while cultivating a narrow black elite whose ascent never altered the distribution of wealth and power.
Patrick Bond tracked the same settlement through the neoliberal turn of the mid-1990s and through the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) plan’s labour effects. He recorded 71 000 formal-sector non-agricultural job losses in 1996, 126 000 in 1997 and 186 000 in 1998, with 500 000 net losses from 1996 to 1999.
The GNU now governs that inheritance through austerity. The treasury’s May 2025 Budget Overview states that consolidated spending over the medium term was revised down by R69.4 billion and that debt-service costs would consume 22% of revenue in 2025/26.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2025 Article IV report pressed South Africa to maintain fiscal consolidation despite weak growth, while acknowledging that consolidation constrains public investment and social spending. Education activists recorded more than 23 000 posts cut across provincial departments.
External pressure continues to tighten the domestic squeeze. The World Bank recorded weak growth, contracting per capita income and unemployment above 30%, while the United States imposed a 30% tariff on South African goods in August 2025. Eskom implemented an average electricity tariff increase of 8.76% from 1 April 2026, which drives up the cost of food, transport, rent and production.
Poverty works through the body and the psyche and policy discourse captures only part of that damage. Stats SA reports that 10.8 million people remained below the food poverty line in 2023 and that 66.7% of South Africans lived below the upper-bound poverty line. The National Food and Nutrition Security Survey places stunting among children aged 0 to 5 at 28.8%. The 2017 Land Audit found that white individual owners held 72% of farms by area, while African owners held 4%.
White ownership still dominates the ground. Black workers continue to bear the labour burden, while children absorb its effects physically and parents absorb them psychologically. A society in which the typical white worker earns R25 000 and the typical black African worker earns R5 200 reproduces dispossession each month through the wage structure itself.
White grievance politics refuses to confront the degradation imposed on the majority across centuries. The wage table, unemployment figures and ownership patterns already deliver the verdict.
South Africa now faces the question of power. The country requires a strategic transfer of economic and political power grounded in land, industry, labour and sovereign control over the material basis of life. Workers’ Day will carry truth only when African power takes command of African land, labour and destiny.
Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker and political analyst. She specialises in African politics, geopolitics, multipolarity, media power, Western imperialism and the unfinished question of African sovereignty in post-apartheid South Africa.
On Workers’ Day 2026, the typical white worker still stands far above the typical black African worker in a labour market built through conquest, land theft and racial rule
