The need to establish baseline artisan productivities in the South African employmentintensive
construction sector stems from the fact that these productivity norms have not
been reviewed on a frequent basis. To others, these productivity norms hardly exist. With
both scenarios, it is difficult to compare artisan productivity trends in the last fifty years
to the trend of international standards.
Constructive efforts have been made in this document to highlight the productivity norms
that have existed within the building industry since the 1950’s. A similar exercise has
been done for the USA and other European countries, notably the UK. A comparison of
these trends of productivity norms has revealed that the current artisan productivity
figures in South Africa are the lowest since the 1950’s. Again, they are the lowest
amongst these countries. In the 1950’s, the artisan productivity norms in South Africa
were quite close and thus comparable to the European countries but the gap has widened
thereafter. The USA has generally experienced a continuous improvement in their
productivity norms on an annual basis and this has been due partly to the improvement in
the working tools of artisans.
Another important factor is the poor quality of artisanship. The constructive effort being
made by the South African government towards ensuring the sustainability of small and
emerging contractors in employment-intensive construction is not in balance; the
Contractor learnership programme of the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP)
must go hand-in- hand with an artisan learnership programme.
Key words: baseline artisan productivity, task-group, work-study, construction, face &
stock-bricks, plastering, painting and tiling.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/6114 |
| Date | 13 February 2009 |
| Creators | Doku, Ivan T.A. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf |
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