The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) Deputy General-Secretary Solly Phetoe says government’s economic reconstruction and recovery plan is not helping to save jobs.
His comments come after Statistics South Africa released figures revealing that the unemployment rate has increased by 0.5% to reach 34.9% in the third quarter of 2021.
This means that the number of unemployed people now stands at 7 643 000.
According to an expanded definition of unemployment that includes those discouraged from seeking work, 46.6% of the labour force was without work in the third quarter.
The data further shows that the largest declines in employment have been recorded in Gauteng, North West, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo.
“It looks like both at the level of government and employers, they have no capacity to deal with the implementation of the agreement we’ve reached in terms of the stimulus packages that we agreed at the National Job Summit. But also including the issue of the economic reconstruction plan. Really, it’s highly disappointing. Now COVID-19 has now increased, we’ve lost over 20 000 jobs in a few months and that shows that as workers we’ll continue to be punished,” says Phetoe.
“Unemployment an unsustainable crisis”
The levels of unemployment in the country, especially amongst the youth and women constitutes a crisis that is unsustainable.
This is the sentiment expressed by Secretary-General of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu), Zwelinzima Vavi.
Vavi says that Saftu is disappointed that governemnt has refused to amend its economic policies:
