SA needs ‘400,000 jobs a year to stop strikes’, and that won’t be happening

Close to 400,000 jobs must be created per year, with both the government and the private sector playing active roles in the process, or the country will face many more strikes, a labour expert says.

Innovative Staffing Solutions managing director Arnoux Mare said strikes such as yesterday’s national mass action organised by trade union federation Cosatu could not be avoided unless unemployment was reduced. He said strikes over the high rate of unemployment and job losses would continue if government did not create secure employment at a faster rate than envisaged.

Such strikes inconvenienced both the public and private sectors, devastated the economy and affected investment prospects.

Instead of helping to end unemployment, strikes worsened it, because employers were put under duress due to loss of profits. This would, in turn, result in many employers considering retrenchments.

National strikes also cost the country billions of rands in lost production and wages.

Cosatu attempted to mobilise its 2 million members to join yesterday’s national strike demanding an end to the current jobs bloodbath that has seen the official unemployment rate shoot up to 27.5% and the unofficial rate exceed 35%.

Cosatu and its affiliate members march to the Gauteng legislature in Johannesburg, 13 February 2019, on a one-day nationwide strike against job losses and Eskom restructuring. Picture: Nigel Sibanda

The unions were protesting retrenchments in the private sector, especially in mines where at least 75,000 jobs were lost over the past three years, with close to 100,000 to go with the pending closure of five coal mines in Mpumalanga.

Mare said President Cyril Ramaphosa’s promise to create more than 270,000 jobs a year was not enough.

“The country needs to create between 350,000 and 400,000 jobs per year in order to keep the nation at work.

“The private sector, especially entrepreneurs, are the biggest creators of jobs and they must look at how to do more to solve joblessness in the country.”

Cosatu and its affiliates march to the Gauteng legislature in Johannesburg, 13 February 2019, on a one-day nationwide strike against job losses and Eskom restructuring. Picture: Nigel Sibanda

Currently, South Africa’s employment situation is unfavourable, considering the recent Statistics South Africa report finding that 6.1 million people are without jobs. The statistics indicated the country also had 2.9 million discouraged jobseekers and another 12.6 million people who were not economically active.

“The government cannot create mass employment fast enough to eradicate poverty or bring the unemployment rate down,” said Mare. “Private companies need to assist the stimulation of the economy by creating jobs.

“Our business model has proven successful and has offered our clients the room to focus and grow their companies, which ultimately leads to more people being employed.”

Mare said Minister of Finance Tito Mboweni’s budget speech next week would serve to gauge how the government would adapt its current strategies to provide for the envisaged job creation in both the public and private sectors.

Labour lawyer and partner at Hogan Lovells South Africa Osborne Molatudi said the Cosatu strike was a clear political statement to government that it has to do something about unemployment.

– ericn@citizen.co.za

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