In the run up to the Presidential Jobs Summit, the big question was whether the impact of the commitments that would emerge would accord with the scale of South Africa’s unemployment crisis. Would it deliver the “extraordinary measures” needed to address our most pressing social crisis that the President called for a few months ago?
These measures were needed, it is worth recalling because South Africa’s unemployment crisis is vast: nearly 10 million adults who want to work cannot find any, and the rate at which jobs are created is so slow that unemployment queues have increased by an average of nearly 900 people every single day over the last 10 years. Worst of all: the number of young people in jobs has actually fallen over the past decade.
The main reasons for this are set out in the opening section of the Jobs Summit Agreement. Growth has been too slow and what growth we have had has been capital- and skill-intensive in character, and has failed to create the kinds of jobs needed to absorb the large numbers of job-seekers who received sub-standard education in our largely dysfunctional schools. Add to that the limitations of our skills production machinery, the ratchet-like tightening of labour market regulations and the raising of minimum wages, and the necessity for “extraordinary measures” becomes apparent.
So, given the depth of the crisis, did the Jobs Summit deliver interventions that might move the dial? Unfortunately, the provisional answer to this question must be, “No.” This is despite the fact that most of the initiatives announced at the Jobs Summit are positive and desirable.
The agreement proposes a veritable raft of measures, large and small, across multiple sectors of the economy, including everything from R100 billion in financing for black business development to a 100-worker clothing factory in the Eastern Cape.
Some of these have been announced before, others are new, and some are barely developed. Most seem positive (though final judgement will have to be deferred until more detail is available and the cost, quality and impact of their implementation assessed).