‘Worrying’ employment slump across 8 sectors

The Black Management Forum (BBF) has attributed a decline in employment figures across eight sectors to limited participation from black business in the economy.

The slump in employment was announced by Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) yesterday in a report on quarterly employment statistics.

StatsSA said employment had declined by 15000 quarter-on-quarter, from 9288000 in December 2015 to 9273000 in March 2016.

Commenting on the figures, BMF deputy chairman Dumisani Mpafa said limiting economic participation to white-owned big businesses would continue to hinder employment growth.

“For as long as the structure of the economy is the way it is, we should forget about an employment growth. We need economic growth that can absorb not only those in job market, but those that enter it,” he said.

He said that every year there were no less than 500000 new job entrants and if they were not absorbed there was no hope that the unemployment rate could drop.

“The only way we can deal with this is to look at the structure of the economy, fix it and broaden it for greater participation.

“We need to unbundle the economy, we need small and medium-sized enterprises that create employment. This big business mentality we have is not going to help,” Mpafa said.

The report highlighted declines in eight sectors including mining, manufacturing, electricity, construction, trade, transport, business services and community services.

“This was largely due to decreases in the following industries:

lTrade (-36000 or -1.8%); lBusiness services (-9000 or

-0.4%);

lManufacturing (-8000 or -0.7%);

lTransport (-5000 or -1.1%) and lMining and quarrying (-4000 or

-0.9%),” the report reads.

Further analysis of the data shows that the electricity industry has remained unchanged when doing a quarter-on-quarter comparison.

Commenting on the report, economist Mike Schussler said the decrease was concerning and a worrying trend for the country’s economy.

“If you look at the long-term trend, it shows that we are still not creating jobs in the private sector, most of the jobs happened in the community sector.

“We cannot afford government employment anymore because that means that the rest of us have to pay higher taxes.

“The other concern is that mining is at a 10-year low and our manufacturing sector is at a 42-year low,” Schussler said.

The trends in the report, however, show that there were increases reported in the community services and construction industry.

The community services industry increased by 1.7% and the construction industry by 0.6%.