The establishment of baseline artisan productivities as a means to monitoring employment-intensive construction: comparison to a South African case study

The need to establish baseline artisan productivities in the South African employmentintensiveconstruction sector stems from the fact that these productivity norms have notbeen reviewed on a frequent basis. To others, these productivity norms hardly exist. Withboth scenarios, it is difficult to compare artisan productivity trends in the last fifty yearsto the trend of international standards.Constructive efforts have been made in this document to highlight the productivity normsthat have existed within the building industry since the 1950’s. A similar exercise hasbeen done for the USA and other European countries, notably the UK. A comparison ofthese trends of productivity norms has revealed that the current artisan productivityfigures in South Africa are the lowest since the 1950’s. Again, they are the lowestamongst these countries. In the 1950’s, the artisan productivity norms in South Africawere quite close and thus comparable to the European countries but the gap has widenedthereafter. The USA has generally experienced a continuous improvement in theirproductivity norms on an annual basis and this has been due partly to the improvement inthe working tools of artisans.Another important factor is the poor quality of artisanship. The constructive effort beingmade by the South African government towards ensuring the sustainability of small andemerging contractors in employment-intensive construction is not in balance; theContractor 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.