No job, no money - who's next? Middle class hit hard by faltering economy

Sisonke Maloni, 25, is one of 573,000 South Africans to have joined the ranks of the unemployed in the past year.

A member of the emerging middle class with a degree in public administration from the University of Johannesburg, Maloni lost his R15,000-a-month job at a steel manufacturing company in Boksburg in June.

With his salary, he took care of his parents, sister and nephew. Now, with no savings, he doesn't know how they will survive. Unlikely to afford the R4,500 rent on his flat, he is considering going home to Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape.

SA's staggering unemployment rate, released last week, soared to 29% in the second quarter. Maloni is one of 9.4-million jobless South Africans, 2.7-million of whom have given up looking for work.

He is also one of 8-million people aged between 15 and 34 who are neither employed nor studying.

The Old Mutual Savings & Investments Monitor, released last month, found that four out of 10 of households don't have enough in savings to pay the bills in the next month should the main breadwinner be retrenched.

"As affordability bites, so buffer savings become a luxury. This leaves households very exposed with 38% of metro working households only having enough savings to last a month or less if their main source of income was lost," the monitor found.

Three months ago, the company where Maloni had worked as an administrator for three years announced that it had to reduce production - and jobs.

"I honestly never thought I will be retrenched. I'm young, educated and saw myself as an asset to the company because I'm skilled in a lot of areas," he said.

"There are lots of opportunities here in Gauteng and the money is also better, but if I don't get something in a month I'll have to go back home. I don't want to end up sleeping on the streets because I can't pay rent."

Maloni and his family are not alone.

In May, the University of Cape Town's Marketing Institute published a study describing two distinct middle classes - the predominantly black emerging middle class and the predominantly white established middle class.

Called "Worlds apart: An investigation of SA's established and emerging middle class consumers", the report found that the established middle class is better cushioned by family and friends "in times of financial trouble or income shocks, such as retrenchment or business failure".

"Established and multi-generational middle-class consumers can lean on existing support structures," the study found.

Durban resident Mark Allen, 51, and his three sons have been surviving on such generosity. They receive R5,000 a month from an anonymous donor, and Allen has raised R65,000 since December through crowd-funding scheme BackaBuddy. But even this is now running out.

Allen was retrenched from his sales job in September last year at the same time his wife, Caroline, was diagnosed with cancer. She died in June.

"I live day by day," he said in tears on the phone, adding that his landlord visited this week to serve an eviction notice. He doesn't know where the family will go. Allen and his boys, aged 12, 16 and 19, live on bread and two-minute noodles.

"Last night I had to call a mate to ask for food," said Allen.

One of his sons attends a prestigious Durban school on a sports scholarship, and has been placed on its feeding scheme. His two youngest children have missed days of school when Allen has run short of petrol.

"My kids need counselling because their mom died and I can't afford it because our medical aid was cancelled."

Although there is no available research to show how many South Africans are slipping out of the middle-class bracket, the study's lead author, James Lappeman, said the emerging middle class was vulnerable.

"Being first-generation middle class is often an insecure or precarious position where the fall back into a lower class is a real possibility in the case of a job loss or business failure," he said.

Warren Hunter, 36, who was retrenched "out of the blue" in August last year from his office manager position at a financial services company in Johannesburg, has had enough of being unemployed. He has decided to leave his wife in Johannesburg while he goes home to his parents in KwaZulu-Natal for six months, where he will train to become a mechanic.

All Hunter wants to do is to provide for his wife, who lives with a rare illness, but he is R50,000 in debt and has R100 in his bank account.

"She is doing everything. She is the provider now and it breaks me - I should be doing it."

Like Hunter, Maloni is also considering another career, and returning to university to pursue a different degree. "At this moment I will take any job that will put food on the table. I'm also thinking of studying law or engineering but I'll study part-time because I have responsibilities now," he said.