South Africa, a Nation With Sharp Inequality, Considers a Minimum Wage.

Approximately 400,000 people live in Khayelitsha, which is roughly situated between two of South Africa’s richest areas: Cape Town and the wine country of Stellenbosch. The township provides many of the workers for both communities. 

Credit

Joao Silva/The New York Times

KHAYELITSHA, South Africa — He works in AIDS prevention and his wife gets the occasional gig at a local supermarket. But neither job is regular enough for a “proper home,” Zwai Lugogo says, so his family lives in a shack here in Cape Town’s largest black township, making do with thin walls of painted metal.

Many of his neighbors — housekeepers, factory workers, nurse’s aides — are in the same predicament, working hard at jobs available to black South Africans, but barely scraping by.

“That money that we’re getting from work is just not enough to be able to take care of our families,” said Mr. Lugogo, 34, as neighborhood children, including his 3-year-old son, ran around their narrow street recently. “We need an intervention.”

South Africa is now considering one. Faced with rising discontent over the economy among black voters, the government is weighing something more common in developed economies: a national minimum wage.

Norimitsu Onishi.

Full story at NY Times.