Word: pdl
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Dates: during 1977-1977
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Through this kind of legally-enforced racism, apartheid ensures low wages for blacks. The average income in the Bantustans is estimated to be about a third of the Poverty Datum Line (PDL), the minimum needed for survival. (It is generally conceded that 150 per cent of the PDL is needed for a decent life, as the PDL makes no provision for things like medicine, education, furniture or recreation). About a quarter of the Africans living in the Bantustans are both landless and jobless. Death reigns in the barren huts: half the children die before age six; starvation, malnutrition and diseases...
Things are not so much better for blacks in the townships outside "white" cities. Eighty per cent of the Africans there earn less than the PDL; four-fifths of African workers show signs of malnutriton...
...firms frequently claim they are a force for progress in South Africa, pointing to wages that are slightly higher than the country's average--at or just above the PDL. But in their search for higher profits, these companies ask only that South African wages be lower than wages they would have to pay Americans--and their black workers earn, on average, less than a quarter of their U.S. counterparts' wages. In addition, the companies cite average pay, glossing over big differences between a handful of relatively well-paid Africans and the other black workers. Most U.S. companies...