Statement on rising, crisis-high unemployment
24 June 2020
The South African Communist Party has noted the Quarterly Labour Force Survey released by Statistics South Africa on Tuesday, 23 June 2020. The SACP is deeply concerned about the continuously rising, crisis-high unemployment. According to the survey, the narrow (‘official’) unemployment rate which excludes discouraged work-seekers increased from 29.1 per cent in the last quarter of 2019 to 30.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2020, affecting approximately 7.1 million active work-seekers. The total (‘expanded’) unemployment rate covering active and discouraged work-seekers increased from 38.7 per cent in the last quarter of 2019 to 39.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2020. The total unemployed population numbered approximately 10.8 million workers in the first quarter of 2020. The increasing unemployment is driven by numerous structural and cyclical factors.
The Quarterly Labour Force Survey was released within two days after our ally the ANC represented by its Secretary-General Cde Ace Magashule released a statement expressing strong disapproval of retrenchments both in the public and private sector. The SACP supports the strong stance against retrenchments and further reiterates its call to organised labour and workers across the economy to unite and face off the jobs bloodbath.
Capital overwhelmingly controls the South African economy and both enjoys and seeks to deepen that monopoly control in favour of profit maximisation without regard to the impact of retrenchments and other workplace restructuring strategies on workers. Capital is increasingly retrenching workers as part of its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The state has the responsibility to guarantee the right of all people of working age to work, in terms of the Freedom Charter. Therefore government as well as public entities cannot take its cue from capital. Government has to build a people’s economy – an economy that lifts the working-class out of unemployment, poverty and inequality as well as associated exploitation.
The fact that production and trade in goods and services are meant for maximising profit and capital accumulation and not meeting the needs of the people is the central structural driver of unemployment, and also mass poverty and inequality. The countries constituting the core of the capitalist world-system push the conditions of more unemployment to those located in its outer orbits. Colonialism and its power relations have played a central role in that regard. That unequal relation and its dynamics are still very active through imperialist domination. This is one of the reasons why global unemployment is concentrated in the south.
The SACP has recently released a paper on structural economic transformation to rid our economy of colonial features, advance the right of all people falling in the working-age population to work and radically reduce poverty, unemployment, inequality and unequal development.
The SACP reiterates the proposals made in the paper. These include a massive infrastructure rollout programme linked with manufacturing localisation, a transformation of the mining sector to support domestic manufacturing expansion and diversification, a transformation of the financial sector to serve national development imperatives, support for agriculture and its combination with manufacturing through among others agro-processing, and a high impact employment creation industrial policy.
These and other proposals aimed at advancing our democratic transition into a second radical phase require a change in the macro-economic framework, as the paper asserts. To this end, the ANC May 2019 general election manifesto, the electoral mandate of the current administration, places emphasis the on the alignment of the macro-economic framework to support the objectives of the second radical phase of our democratic transition.
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, Central Committee Member for Media & Communications, SACP, 24 June 2020
