City Press writes that the millions of factory jobs that China is likely to lose to countries that provide cheaper labour over the next decade could be the last chance for developing countries like SA to pick up these labour-intensive industrial jobs to solve its high unemployment crisis.

The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), an independent think-tank for policy research, says in a new report that SA can do this in a special economic zone (SEZ). However, this zone must be “truly special”, with a business environment for labour-intensive industries that use low-skilled labour to produce mass-consumption goods for the export market at competitive prices. Toys, clothing and technology products are examples of such consumables. Ann Bernstein, the CDE’s executive director, said that the CDE was again motivating in the report that the idea of such an SEZ should be tested in the Coega SEZ in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape. She said that due to increasing automation, manufacturing was relying less and less on human labour. If SA still wanted to benefit from labour-intensive manufacturing, it must immediately start creating the kind of jobs that are now becoming too expensive in Chinese factories. “We have to test the idea of a different kind of SEZ. It is uncertain whether it will succeed, but it is certain that this is probably our last chance to create the many labour-intensive factory jobs that we urgently need to employ low-skilled workers with little work experience,” said Bernstein. She pointed out that only two out of every five adults in SA had a job and described it as a “bloodbath” of the labour force that 10 million people were unemployed. According to her, the SEZ experiment should show within three to five years whether meaningful job creation had taken place. However, the results could be visible sooner.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Riana De Lange at City Press

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