E Cape loses 45 000 jobs

BCM unemployment rises by 5.7% with 15 000 losing income

ATOTAL of 45 000 jobs were lost in the Eastern Cape between March 2017 and March this year. This is an increase of 3.4% in the province’s unemployment rate, according to the latest statistics, which were released by Statistics South Africa on Tuesday.

In Buffalo City Metro, unemployment increased by even more: 5.7%.

This means thee number of employed people in the metro dropped from 257 000 to 242 000, or in other words, 15 000 people lost their jobs during the year.

According to StatsSA director for labour statistics Desree Manamela, most employment losses in the province were recorded in the private household sector, which shed 9 000 jobs, the informal sector, where 6 000 jobs were lost and the agriculture sector, where 4 000 people became unemployed.

By mid-2017, the population in the Eastern Cape stood at 6.5 million people.

Of these, over 4.2 million people are of working age – between 15 and 64 – which is an increase from the 4.1 million counted last year.

Although there was a small quarterly increase of 7 000 jobs from December 2017 to March 2018, this did little to change the decrease in the overall performance of the province from last year.

Manamela attributed the employment increase in that quarter to just four of the 10 industries reviewed.

“The contributors to the increase were community and social services, manufacturing, construction and transport.

“The largest employment declines were recorded in trade and finance and other business services industries,” she said.

The majority of unemployed people in the Eastern Cape were black Africans. While the number of working age people in this group increased from 3.5 million to 3.6 million, 27 000 people in the group lost their jobs last year.

Border-Kei Chamber of Business director Les Holbrook said the fundamentals in state-owned companies needed to be fixed.

“We have to acknowledge that there are a lot of things that are broken. If we talk about our state-owned entities, not one of them is working properly. They are all going through reorganising and there is a lot of turmoil in that sector of SA at the moment,” he said.

The national unemployment rate, which excludes those who are no longer looking for work, remained stable at 26.7%.

In a statement issued by the general secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions, Zwelinzima Vavi, the latest unemployment statistics painted a miserable picture of the labour sector in the country.

“President Cyril Ramaphosa has talked a lot about these problems and promised us a ‘new dawn’, but the workers are not going to see that new dawn if he continues to imagine that the capitalist free-market economy is going to turn his words into deeds.”