Ann Bernstein, Executive Director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise, has called upon the Cabinet and the new Minister of Employment and Labour to act speedily to make the changes South Africa requires to build a much bigger and more labour intensive economy. “Bold decisions are required now to start tackling unemployment especially youth unemployment in meaningful numbers.” Bernstein expressed.

Bernstein’s call comes at the back of the recent quarter’s statistics which explicitly reveal that South Africa lost 237,000 jobs. In his analysis in this regard, expanded unemployment currently sits at 38 per cent or 9,9 million people. Between the first quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2019, 3.6 million people joined the unemployment queue – an average of just under 1 000 people per day for a decade.

“Think of it this way. Of South Africa’s nine provinces, only Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal are home to more than 9,9 million people. The total working age population in the Northern, Eastern and Western Capes combined is 9,7 million. Just to halve unemployment, South Africa would need to create 11 times the number of jobs that currently exist in the mining sector.” Bernstein stated

At the heart of poverty and inequality there is South Africa’s mass unemployment, that which Bernstein sees as a contributing factor to the immeasurable social dysfunction and political instability. According to this Development and Enterprise expect, a key reason for the unemployment crisis is that policymakers have been driven by a set of ideas about employment and the labour market that are unsuited to the challenges we face.

“In South Africa, too much time is spent deriding an approach to employment that has served so many other countries well and vainly trying to invent a new approach to growth and employment that ignores the lessons of success elsewhere. Far too little time is spent thinking about the horrors of unemployment, especially young people. Most unemployed people have few options: rural or urban misery and hopelessness, dependence long into adulthood on parents and grandparents, a life of struggle in the informal sector, subjugation to fathers, brothers and husbands. In this context working in a basic job in a factory for low wages would be attractive to many hundreds of thousands of people. And these basic jobs are not an end point and can lead, as they often have elsewhere, to better jobs, better wages and other opportunities in time.” Expressed Bernstein.

He concluded that unless core policies are revisited and soon, yet another Youth Day will come and go, and, despite the hot air, another generation will grow up in a country of mass unemployment and hopelessness.

-The VIP Team

–Ann Bernstein

-CDE’s Agenda 2019

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