The Effect of Load Shedding on Productivity in South African Manufacturing: Organisational Responses and Structural Constraints

South Africa's manufacturing sector operates within a structural energy crisis that constitutes the most severe infrastructure constraint on industrial productivity among comparable middle-income economies. This study examines how load shedding affects organisational-level productivity in South Africa's manufacturing industry, investigating the mechanisms through which power outages disrupt production and the adaptive strategies firms deploy to mitigate those effects. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted in 2023 with eleven participants drawn from six major manufacturing firms across the automotive, steel and metals, food and beverages, paper and pulp, and packaging subsectors, and the data were analysed using Braun and Clarke's (2022) reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: management of change, productivity impacts, and structural and external constraints. All eleven participants reported production downtime as the primary consequence of load shedding; nine of eleven identified backup generator capacity as structurally insufficient to sustain full-scale production during outage events; and machinery restart procedures consumed between 30 and 90 additional minutes of productive time per outage cycle beyond the scheduled interruption duration. Eight of eleven participants reported post-outage workload intensification, accompanied by physical fatigue and irregular scheduling, and all six participating organisations had restructured shift arrangements to concentrate productive activity within stable electricity-supply windows. Adaptive strategies: backup power deployment, labour redeployment, shift restructuring, and performance management recalibration, provided only partial mitigation; accessible in their most effective forms exclusively to larger, capital-intensive firms, reproducing structural inequalities within the sector. Load shedding constitutes a systemic threat to South African manufacturing productivity that firm-level adaptation alone cannot neutralise.