President Thabo Mbeki has questioned the figures produced by official data capturer Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) on unemployment figures and says it is “quite unlikely” that its figures are correct — otherwise people would have seen millions of people in the streets looking for work.
There are even millionaires among those working in the grey economy — unregistered and unlicensed traders — who are deemed “unemployed”, he argued on Friday.
Mbeki questioned the figure of 26,9% unemployment — or about 4,4-million people — by March last year.
“This is such a large number of people that nobody could possibly have missed the million(s) that would be in the streets and village paths actively looking for work — which was part of the definition of employment used by Stats SA.”
Instead, the president argued, studies of the South African labour market suggest that the country’s economy has both shed and created jobs, with the number of jobs created exceeding jobs lost through retrenchment.
He said in his weekly column ANC Today — in his capacity as African National Congress leader — that T-Sec economist Mike Schussler recently pointed out that the number of jobs in the formal economy grew by 1% in 2002, about 2% in 2003 and then 2,7% last year — a total of 345Â 000 jobs over three years.
Mbeki agreed with the argument that this defies the widely held view that jobs are being shed at an alarming rate because of the strength of the rand — which has been eroding exports.
Turning to an International Labour Organisation-sponsored 2002 study on the post-apartheid labour market, prepared by Laura Poswell, he pointed out that she reported that between 1995 and 1999, South Africa had experienced increases in both the demand for and the supply of labour.
The growth of supply, however, had outstripped the growth in demand — worsening the “employment gap” by 12% in this period.
Nevertheless, Mbeki argued that casualisation of the workforce has grown. Many of the temporary workers entering the labour market — and the system of national statistics — are registered as “unemployed”.
The president said “more work” is needed to get a more accurate picture of the size of the “grey economy” — the numbers of people working in unregistered enterprises or unlicensed traders.
He said: “To give an indication of the importance of this challenge, we know that not so long ago, goods produced by one of our companies amounting to R6-billion a year were bought and sold by unlicensed traders — some of whom are millionaires.
“Yet these people would appear in our national statistics as unemployed,” he said.
Mbeki acknowledged, however, that high unemployment levels constitute a threat to employed workers and to property owners.
“These cannot afford a rebellion of the marginalised against a system that guarantees the property owners their property rights and comfortable lives, while condemning the excluded millions to lives of misery.
“Equally, the democratic state has a direct and immediate interest to ensure that because they are denied access to a better life, the excluded do not repudiate and rise up against the democratic order, believing that it is incapable of serving their interests.
“Our social partners (including labour and business) have a shared interest to defeat the related scourges of unemployment and poverty. Properly to respond to this common challenge, they will have to learn how to achieve the correct balance between their partisan and collective interests,” said the president, without further elaboration. — I-Net Bridge