Cohort of unemployed: Too many young people - often graduates with skills, still stand impatient and visibly angry outside the economy.
On 1 May, South Africa once again marks Workers’ Day. It is a day with real historical meaning. It honours the dignity of work, the struggles of workers and the labour movement’s role in the fight for justice in our country.
But this year, as in too many years before it, the occasion arrives with a bitter irony: millions of South Africans are expected to celebrate workers while being denied the chance to become workers at all.
That is the central tragedy of South Africa in 2026. On the official definition, unemployment stands at 31.4%. On the expanded definition, which includes discouraged work-seekers who have given up looking, it stands at 42.1%. That means roughly 7.8 million South Africans are officially unemployed. To me, these are not abstract figures in the Quarterly Labour Force Review.
They are parents who cannot provide, young people who cannot start and families who are told hollowly to wait just a little longer for the economy to turn around.
Workers’ Day should be a celebration of progress through work. In South Africa, it too often becomes a ritual of denial. On this day, South Africans are often treated to the stale theatre of political self-congratulation. Yet the lived reality of millions of citizens is not dignified work, but exclusion from work: no ladder into the economy, but a wall around it.
A country cannot call itself serious about workers while so many of its people remain locked out of work altogether.
The first truth we need to recover is that jobs do not come from rhetoric. Jobs come from growth, investment and confidence in the economy.
Jobs require functioning and maintained infrastructure, reliable electricity, safer streets, efficient transport, clean governance and a state that understands its job is to enable enterprise, not suffocate it.
A society does not become more pro-worker by making it harder to hire, build, trade and invest. It becomes more pro-worker by clearing the path for breakout growth, making it easier for millions more people to enter the world of work. That is why the contrast within South Africa matters so much.
The Western Cape now has the lowest official unemployment rate of any province in the country, at 18.1%, compared with the national rate of 31.4%. On the expanded definition, too, the Western Cape performs materially better, at 23.7% compared with 42.1% nationally.
Between the third and fourth quarters of 2025, the Western Cape added 93 000 jobs and year on year it added 95 000. These are not miracles and they do not mean all is well. But they do show that better policy, better governance and a more functional state can produce better outcomes for working people.
The same is true in Cape Town. Stats SA’s latest figures show that Cape Town’s official unemployment rate fell to 19.8% in the fourth quarter of 2025. The metro added 69 000 jobs quarter on quarter and 113 000 jobs year on year, taking the number of employed people in the city to 1.895 million. The city’s employment-to-population ratio also rose to 57.6%.
These are encouraging numbers and evidence that where government does its basics well — where it keeps the lights on, maintains infrastructure, manages finances responsibly and works to create an environment for growth — people have a better shot at finding work and building a life.
The growth you see in places where the Democratic Alliance (DA) governs is the result of leadership, of setting a clear vision, of making it easier to do business by cutting red tape, of focusing relentlessly on the basics and of creating an environment that attracts investment and job creation rather than repels it — a government that gives people a better shot at finding work and building a life.
Of course, nobody should pretend Cape Town or the Western Cape has solved unemployment. They have not. Too many residents are still looking for work.
Too many young people still stand outside the economy, impatient and understandably angry. But there is a profound difference between a government that confronts the problem seriously and one that merely narrates it.
There is a difference between a state that sees business and the private sector as a partner in job creation and one that treats enterprise as a political enemy. There is a difference between governing for headlines and governing for results.
This is the lesson South Africa’s national government has refused to learn.
You cannot regulate your way into mass employment. You cannot tax, threaten and paralyse your way to prosperity.
You cannot build a thriving labour market on the foundations of failing infrastructure, collapsing rail and ports, municipal dysfunction, crime, cadre deployment, corruption and ideological hostility to growth.
And, importantly, you certainly cannot honour workers while presiding over one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. To be truly pro-worker is not merely to speak warmly about labour. It is to build a country in which work is possible.
Job creation: National government cannot build a thriving labour market on the foundations of failing
infrastructure.
It is to understand that the unemployed are not a separate class to be pitied every election cycle and forgotten thereafter. They are South Africans whose dignity is being denied by a state that has failed in its most basic economic duty. The best labour policy is one that produces more labour market entrants.
The best social policy is one that grows the number of breadwinners. The best dignity policy is a job.
So this Workers’ Day, South Africans should ask a simple question: what does it mean to celebrate workers in a country that keeps producing unemployment?
The answer cannot be another speech or another slogan. It must be a commitment to growth, to reform, to cleaner government, to safer communities, to reliable
infrastructure and to an economy that rewards effort instead of punishing it.
Geordin Hill-Lewis is the DA Federal Leader and mayor of Cape Town.