IN A much-read piece published last week on Moneyweb, economist Mike Schüssler rolled up his sleeves and picked a fight. His target was those who argue that closing the wage gap between workers and their bosses would make SA more equal. Anyone who tells workers that striking for higher wages will decrease levels of inequality in SA, Schüssler argues, is either lying or misinformed. Higher wages actually increase inequality.

SA’s huge wage gap, he says, is a myth. If we screen out everyone except those employed in the formal private sector, our Gini coefficient after taxes and social spending is comparable to Germany’s or Norway’s, two of the most equal countries in the world. Inequality in SA is not being driven by the wage gap. It is being driven by the unemployment rate. Labour militancy actually increases inequality because higher wages make job creation more expensive.

If Schüssler is right, SA’s unemployed have not heard him. In a piece published recently on this page, Edward Webster and Mark Orkin present the results of a survey showing that a third of adult South Africans think that a new workers’ party would definitely be a good thing. Among the unemployed, the figure rises to 40%. The prospect of a workers’ party is thus more popular among the jobless than among others. By Schüssler’s lights, the last thing the unemployed need is a political party advocating labour militancy. To the extent that they want one, they are badly informed.

I’m not sure that matters are quite that simple. Something much more interesting is going on.

Imagine that it were possible to assemble all of the unemployed in one place and have them addressed by Schüssler. Imagine that they listen carefully and absorb everything he tells them. I’d guess that those who arrived supporting higher wages would go home convinced that they were right all along.

The vast majority of SA’s unemployed eat enough to survive. The money that buys their food is earned in the productive economy. Who exactly feeds them? You and I do in the form of welfare transfers. And the working people in their lives do because their wages put food on the table. About 70% of South African households receive some wage income, which suggests that a large proportion of the unemployed share a home with a person who works.

Even those among the unemployed who live in wageless households benefit from wages, albeit in less visible ways, as they share a local economy with working people. The unemployed thus want wages to grow as much as they want pensions and child grants to grow. These are their livelihood.

Were Schüssler to address that vast assembly of the unemployed, what he would be offering them is a wager: "The employed people in your lives upon whom you rely to put food on your tables should not get higher wages and should be easier to retrench because this will make it more likely that you will find a job."

Why should they believe him? His proposition sounds awfully clever and slippery. Especially coming from a well-paid man who seems to think that one’s brothers and sons in the platinum industry — people who, until they went on strike, earned less than R6,000 a month — should not earn more.

And, indeed, if an informed and neutral observer were permitted to take the microphone when Schüssler was done, she would probably point out that he has fiddled the books. A Gini coefficient in SA’s formal private economy similar to Norway’s? As Gilad Isaacs argued in the Daily Maverick on Wednesday, Schüssler calculated the effects of tax and welfare transfers on the South African side of his account, but not on the Norwegian side, and was thus not comparing like with like.

A wage gap comparable with the most equal countries in the world? In 2008, the wealthiest 10% in SA received 58% of total income. In France and the UK, the figure was 25% in 2010; 27% in struggling Portugal.

Unemployed people who want to fight for higher wages are quite rational. The idea that wage restraint will help them is counterintuitive. It requires a leap of faith. It requires trust in the person making the argument.

And that is the point. Trust is in short supply in SA. The poor do not trust the wisdom of white economists. And less and less do they trust the ruling party. The African National Congress once held together an uneasy consensus on these matters. No longer. People trust those closest to them, those they’ve known for years, like the workers whose wages put food on the table.

Convincing the middle class that workers should exercise wage restraint is easy. The rest of SA is sceptical. Telling the unemployed that the workers in their lives are members of a privileged elite in a Norwegian-like economy is a nonstarter. Schüssler sounds like a man selling snake oil.

• Steinberg teaches African Studies and Criminology at Oxford University.