COSATU’s response to this year’s first quarter unemployment statistics
The Congress of South African Trade Unions has noted that South Africa’s jobless rate rose to 27, 7% in the first quarter of 2017 after falling slightly to 26.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 according to Statistics South Africa. This report also pointed out that the expanded definition of unemployment, which includes people who have stopped looking for work, increased to 36, 4% from 35,6 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.
This report has corroborated the federation’s assertions that the report of the last quarter of 2017 was defective because it reflected changes that were influenced by December holiday part-time workers. We have long argued and we continue to argue for Jobs Summit to develop a jobs plan for the country and also to help us deal with the retrenchment.
Long term the unemployment problem in South Africa can only be resolved if we work to address the flawed structure of the South African economy. South African government needs to be decisive because the problem of unemployment is a global phenomenon and therefore needs government intervention, especially since we have an ongoing investor strike.
All around the world the various policy interventions that have been used to stimulate economic growth, including quantitative easing and cheap credit, have yielded nothing but lower economic growth rates if not stagnation in many of the advanced economies. The current higher average rates of unemployment in many countries, including South Africa, are increasingly becoming a permanent feature of capitalism in the 21st century. The unemployment forecast predicts that unemployment shall surpass 200 million by the end of this year, growing by 3.4 million in 2017.
The global economic crisis has also deepened in epicentres of capitalism. Vulnerable forms of employment are expected to stay above 42 per cent of total employment, accounting for 1.4 billion people worldwide this year. In South Africa over 5O% of young people remain unemployed and this is compounded by the massive job losses in the mining, agriculture and in the manufacturing sector, in particular (the steel and the auto sector).