COSATU's concern at jobless figures
The Congress of South African Trade Unions is deeply concerned that unemployment is on the rise yet again, after a brief but small drop earlier in the year.
The StatsSA Quarterly Labour Force Survey revealed today that in the third quarter of 2012, the official unemployment rate rose to 25.5% of the labour force, up from 24.9% in the second quarter. That means at least one quarter of the working population is not working!
The more realistic expanded definition of unemployment, which includes people who have stopped looking for work, increased to 36.3% from 36.2% in the same period.
The total number of people without work is 4.67 million - the highest total since records started in 2008, up from 4.47 million in the second quarter.
This grim news makers it even more urgent to start rolling out the government's Industrial Policy Action Plan, the job-creating sections of the New Growth Path and the Infrastructure Development Programme with much greater urgency, if we are to come anywhere near the government target of creating five million new jobs by 2020.
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan highlighted the depth of the problem last week in his MTBS, when he frankly admitted that the economy needs sustained growth of 7% a year - nearly three times the 2.5% forecast for 2012 - to make even a dent in unemployment, yet alone meet the ANC's ambitious target.
As the COSATU 11th National Congress declared in September 2012:
"While we have made important advances in the areas of democracy, human rights and social benefits, for which we give full credit to the efforts of our Alliance, and the ANC government, socio-economically, workers' lives have not been transformed. As a result of the structural fault-lines of the economy we inherited from colonialism and apartheid, the disastrous neoliberal policies of the 1996 class project, and the worldwide crisis of capitalism, working people face mass unemployment, widespread poverty and widening inequality."
The African National Congress has rightly made job creation a top priority in its programme for a Second Phase of the Transition, and this will surely be confirmed at the Conference in Mangaung in December. The task then will be to turn words into deeds without any delay.
Statement issued by Patrick Craven, COSATU national spokesperson, November 1 2012
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