A long line of men wait along Broadway for their ration of a sandwich and a cup of coffee in Times Square, New York City, in 1932 during the Great Depression. Photograph: AP
Look at it this way, it could be worse. At least there is 2010. Or maybe not. Phillip de Wet reports
Actually, we don’t have it so bad, if you look at it the right way. Although from most angles things look very bad indeed.
Consider the United States. In February US employers fired 651 000 people, bringing the total number of people who lost their jobs because of the recession there to 4.4-million and the unemployment rate soaring to an unheard-of 8.1%.
Consider the United Kingdom. In the three months to the end of December British employers fired 146 000 people, bringing the number of jobless to 1.97-million and the unemployment rate to a staggering 6.3%.
Yet in South Africa unemployment actually — and rather shockingly — decreased in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to Stats SA. There were a quarter of a million fewer people looking for work here than in the previous three months even as the rest of the world fell deeper into the slump and as our own economy contracted for the first time in a decade.
Then again, almost 100 000 of those 250 000 people who were no longer looking for work had just stopped looking, because they had decided there was no hope of finding any. And even with them out of the picture, the unemployment rate still stood at 21.9%, with nearly 3.9-million people looking for jobs — which is almost as many people as those who work in the informal sector, agriculture and private households combined.
South Africa can only dream of an unemployment rate in the single digits, or a measly two million unemployed.
Since September last year there have been mass lay-offs in mining and motor manufacturing. Small and medium-sized companies closed down in the textile industry and in the services sector. Hiring has been frozen at some financial services groups as well as certain marketing and advertising companies. Construction companies have seen foreign projects cancelled or put on hold and exporters have had early indications that the rate of default among customers is rising sharply.
Yup, 2009 is going to be a tough year for a lot of enterprises and at the end of it there will be fewer people with jobs in South Africa than there are now.
How many? Nobody really knows. The depth of the hole will depend on the shape the global economy finds itself in over the coming months and that shape keeps changing as hidden caches of toxic debt are discovered or new structural flaws make themselves known. Sentiment clouds the predictive ability of markets and government interventions and bail-outs mask reality.
Yet in some industries jobs are immune to pretty much whatever the economy may bring, or at least are considered to be so.
”South Africa remains one of the cheapest places in the world to play golf,” says Minette Wallis, a specialist recruiter for a six-month-old firm called Golf People. ”We have some of the best courses in the world and people come here especially to play golf.
”Because of the crime rate people are more inclined to purchase property in a golf estate than they were before, so more courses are being built. Once you have a course you have to maintain it, even if nobody is playing, because if you don’t feed the greens then your asset loses almost all its value.”
Those with specific scarce skills are always in demand — and can afford to be choosy — even in tough times.
”A lot of pharmacists left the country a few years ago when the dispensing legislation changed,” says Delmarie Henning, whose PRN Recruitment specialises in placing pharmacists. ”The rest are very particular. They want to work fewer hours than is required in retail so they prefer to work in other industries and they want to choose exactly where and how they work.”
Some are hopeful that interest rate cuts will spur consumer spending and so recreate jobs that were lost in retail and service, and a few are hopeful that commodity prices will recover and so see miners rehired.
But most of the optimism found in the employment market centres on 2010 and the infrastructure spend, as well as the expected influx of tourists who, in the words of one tour operator, ”will find the money to come and watch the soccer even if they have to beat up their mothers for it”.