Today's Labour News

Engineering News reports that the SA wind industry has called for a standardised metric to determine employment in the energy sector.  

Currently all SA coal power-related employment studies use the metric employees or jobs as opposed to the more internationally applied metric of person-years as used to report renewable energy employment.  A Meridian Economics study commissioned by the SA Wind Energy Association (SAWEA) suggests that the term 'jobs' used by the coal industry could be misleading, as a job could be anything from 1 day to 20 years.  The power sector transition employment briefing paper says it is becoming standard to report employment in person-years both locally and internationally.  “Simply counting a job can be meaningless.  Standardising the metric job-year would assist more meaningful employment comparison between the two sectors (coal and renewable),” says SAWEA.  Energy Minister Jeff Radebe applies the contemporary metric, job-years and full-time equivalent rather than “the old-fashioned and vague” jobs metric when referring to the employment opportunities being created by the renewable energy sector.  He recently explained in Parliament that a job-year is equivalent to a full-time employment opportunity for one person for one year.  Some studies suggest that the loss of coal mining jobs will outweigh the number of jobs created in the renewable energy, nuclear or gas sectors, while more recent studies suggest the opposite.  “Going forward, standardisation of metrics and methodologies is likely to significantly improve the current state of confusion,” says the Meridian Economics study.

• Read this report in full at Engineering News
• Read too, How to improve data on energy transition’s employment effects, at BusinessLive

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page