OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Wednesday
A TOTAL of 23291 workers in the formal business sector lost their jobs between June and September this year, Statistics SA reported this week.
The shed jobs were out of a total figure of 4735052 employees, Annette Myburgh of Stats SA told reporters in Pretoria on Tuesday.
The decline in employment occurred in all industries, but excluded the agricultural sector and those who were self-employed but not registered for VAT.
“The loss of employees across all the industries was mainly due to the resignations and retrenchments of permanent and casual employees.”
Myburgh said the quarterly decrease in the wholesale trade, retail trade, motor trade and hotels industries left 6996 people without employment.
The cause of this was retrenchments of casual workers in the retail industry.
A quarterly survey found that 6756 employees from the community, social and personal service industry lost their jobs – mainly because of fulltime workers accepting retirement packages as well as voluntary resignations.
The survey recorded that 3851 people lost their employment in the manufacturing industry, also due to the retrenchment and resignations of casual as well as permanent workers.
But the number of unemployed people in the formal sector did not necessarily reflect an equivalent increase in the number of unemployed persons in the country, Myburgh said.
“Some of these persons may have found or created employment in industries not covered in this series.” An October 1999 household survey conducted by Stats SA revealed that the total number of employed people in South Africa then was 10.4 million.
This figure consisted of 1.1 million people from the agricultural sector, 1.9 million from the informal sector, 0.8 million from the domestic services industry, and 6.6 million in the overall formal sector.
Unemployment in the country is estimated at above 30%. – AFP