Fin24 reports that SA’s official unemployment rate for the second quarter worsened to a record of 34.4%, and economists expect this to worsen if the impact of the unrest in July is taken into account.
Stats SA on Tuesday released the quarterly labour force survey, which showed unemployment at its highest since the survey was started in 2008. The country's total jobless - those who are seeking work but cannot find jobs - now amount to 7.8 million, compared to 7.2 million recorded in the first quarter. Steep losses were recorded in the formal sector. Taking into account the 3.3 million discouraged work seekers - those who want to work but have given up searching for jobs - the number of jobless comes to over 11 million. "Roughly speaking, the official unemployment rate suggests that one out of three people that are looking for work, can't find employment," said Lisette IJssel de Schepper, senior economist at the Bureau for Economic Research. The level of employment was almost 1.5 million below that seen in the fourth quarter of 2019 - before the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns hit, IJssell de Schepper noted. She added that the outlook for the third quarter was pretty concerning: "We had a stricter lockdown level for most of the quarter relative to Q2 [second quarter]. We would also have to see what the impact will be of the riots and unrest we saw in July." Similarly, chief economist at Citadel, Maarten Ackerman, pointed out that the unemployment figure did not take into account adjusted lockdown level 4 and the unrest in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. "We can expect the number to take a further knock, given lockdown and depending on what happened in the Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal riots," he said.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Lameez Omarjee at Fin24 (paywall access only)
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