Johannesburg - Labour union Solidarity believes “pro-market reforms” could be the key to fixing SA’s declining employment numbers.
The union said on Thursday it was concerned about the weak employment growth in the private sector, and said attention should be placed on the revival of the sector in order to provide the needed boost to increase employment opportunities.
Solidarity’s comments follow the release of Stats SA’s labour market dynamics report on Tuesday, which reviewed labour market trends between 2009 and 2015.
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The report showed that, although over 1.5 million people were employed between 2009 and 2015, the high unemployment rate remained a concern for Statistician-General Pali Lehohla.
Gerhard van Onselen, an economics researcher at Solidarity Research Institute, said the Quarterly Labour Force Survey showed that unemployment increased from 6.7 million to 8.9 million between the second quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2016.
“Over the same period, net employment grew much more slowly by about 1.2 million from an estimated 14.4 million to 15.5 million. At 42 percent, the portion of employed as a percentage of the working age in the second quarter of 2016 is still below the historically high levels of 46 percent, last seen in 2008,”said Van Onselen, in a statement.
“Using the quarterly labour force survey numbers as a guide, the economy would have needed about 1.3 million more people in employment in the second quarter of 2016 in order to achieve an absorption rate of 46 percent. And even more jobs are needed to dramatically curtail local unemployment,” said Van Onselen.
The union said, since 2008, most employment opportunities were created in the public sector, and placed pressure on the National Treasury’s purse strings.
As a solution, it has called for the removal of “regulatory and policy hurdles”.
“What we need is a careful and subsequent removal of regulatory and policy hurdles, political misbehaviour, that hamper the private sectors ability to adjust to the current difficult economic conditions,” said Van Onselen.
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