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BL Premium reports that SA’s unemployment rate hit a fresh high in the third quarter, with signs emerging that, even as lockdown restrictions eased, the country’s labour market faced permanent damage.
Though economic activity picked up in the third quarter after the shock experienced during the worst of the lockdown, Stats SA’s latest quarterly labour force survey suggested that jobs numbers would not bounce back as robustly. Some economists have warned that permanent losses are likely to rise to well over 1-million. SA’s official unemployment rate rose to 30.8% in the third quarter. Though there was a rise in employed people by almost half a million to 14.7-million in the third quarter, this was outweighed by a substantial leap in the number of unemployed people. Trends in the manufacturing sector suggested that there has been permanent damage to the labour market, said Arthur Kamp of Sanlam Investments. He noted that despite a marked increase in actual production activity during the third quarter, the manufacturing industry only managed to add about 2,000 jobs over the period. In the coming quarters, though there was likely to be an increase in the number of employed people, this would be outpaced by the number of people entering the labour market in search of work, Kamp said He reckoned that this would lift the unemployment rate towards about 35%, with overall job losses in the region of 1.6-million. Despite an expected increase in jobs during the fourth quarter, PwC economists Lullu Krugel and Christie Viljoen said net losses of roughly 1.4-million could materialise by year end.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Lynley Donnelly at BusinessLive (paywall access only)
- Read too, SA's unemployment rate reaches record high above 30%, at TimesLIVE
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page