QLFS: ANC has run out of ideas on growth and jobs
31 May 2022
Please find attached a soundbite by Dr Michael Cardo MP.
Despite marginal improvements in the unemployment rate on the back of imperfect data (the official unemployment rate now sits at 34.5% and the expanded rate at 45.5% ) the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) underscores the need for fresh economic thinking.
We are confronted with a pandemic of joblessness. But instead of mitigating the national disaster with workable solutions, the ANC is recycling the same tired old ideas ahead of its Policy Conference in July.
The ruling party’s discussion documents reveal a dearth of innovative economic proposals. Meanwhile President Cyril Ramaphosa still clings to the fallacy that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is a ‘must for growth’.
All of this just shows that the ANC is stuck chin-deep in the economic quicksands without any sort of a roadmap or compass. It can only drive us deeper and deeper into the morass.
The private sector alone is able to create jobs at scale by absorbing predominantly low-skilled people into employment. The DA is committed to unleashing the private sector’s potential. That is why in national government, as our first order of business, we would do three things to stimulate job-creation:
Scrap the automatic extension of collective bargaining council agreements to small and new firms and those who didn’t sign them in the first place.
Empower individual economic sectors to set their own minimum wages, and offer tax exemptions to small businesses to help them absorb the cost of minimum wages.
Put a stop to onerous racial legislation that deters investors, strangles growth and kills jobs -- like the job-destroying Employment Equity Amendment Bill, which currently sits on the President’s desk awaiting his signature.
All the President’s talk of social compacting amounts to a shifting of deckchairs on the Titanic. He is completely out of touch.
In his newsletter yesterday, the President claimed that BEE is ‘about eradicating inequality’, when in fact BEE is so obviously a crony-enrichment scheme for ANC fat cats: it has served to deepen inequality in South Africa. In the same way, the Employment Equity Amendment Bill will lead to job losses and widen the gap between economic insiders and outsiders.
Until the government takes the hard decisions that will begin to arrest our economic decline -- like reforming the rigid labour market, scrapping racial legislation and ditching its hare-brained localisation scheme – SA is headed for mounting job losses.
Issued by Michael Cardo, DA Shadow Minister for Employment and Labour, 31 May 2022
