Sunday World (South Africa)

Slippery road of class, race

- GLENDA KRUSS

ETTING hired in South Africa can be a serious challenge given the country’s unemployme­nt rate of 26.6% and a trend towards declining employment in the formal non-agricultur­al sector.

There are many possible routes job seekers can take as they seek to enter the workforce. Some are clearly marked out, facilitati­ng a smooth transition. Others are not very clearly marked and are fraught with difficulty, leading to uncertaint­y and often significan­t personal hardship.

Individual­s and groups access the labour market from different points of departure, depending on their skills, occupation­s, age, race and gender. There are many labour markets in which diverse factors such as geography (rural, urban), degree of formality (formal, informal) and political economy (centre, periphery) play a defining role.

We compared insights on this diversity and complexity across a set of research projects conducted by the Labour Market Intelligen­ce Partnershi­p. What we found was that social networks and inequality matter a lot in the world of job seekers. This suggests that there is a need for formal public mechanisms to ensure that there’s a fairer distributi­on of informatio­n for people looking for work.

Inequality in higher education

A recent study traced the widely divergent journeys of graduates from two very different universiti­es in South Africa. It followed 469 graduates from Rhodes University and 742 from University of Fort Hare through their degree programmes and into the labour market.

Most of the Rhodes graduates were white, and were more likely to have come from higher income homes and attended elite schools. Most of the Fort Hare graduates were black and were more likely than their Rhodes counterpar­ts to be the first in their families to attend university.

The study found that the different groups used very different job search methods. For Rhodes graduates the most common path of finding employment was through personal networks (30%). Fort Hare graduates relied primarily on newspaper advertisem­ents (36%). The study concluded: This finding speaks volumes about the nature of links to the market and about the perpetuati­on of past sources of inequality in access to higher education and employment.

Another study of public attitudes to work found that work-seekers used a range of ways to access the labour market. Ninety percent of those surveyed said that social networks were the most frequent” way to look for work.

This trend isn’t unique to South Africa. Research on job searching globally shows that for a while personal networks have been recognised as an efficient tool to use when looking for employment.

The study on attitudes to work and unemployme­nt also found that job seekers from rural areas were more likely to rely on informal networks, talking to relatives and friends.

It notes that the inaccessib­ility of informatio­n about vacancies supplied through formal sources is a barrier to finding employment.

How do formal public systems contribute?

How then do formal public employment services in South Africa measure up, to promote transition­s to the labour market?

A study done in 2015 looked at employer interactio­n with a government-funded employment service that matches job seekers to employers.

The research found that job seekers used a diversity of search methods.

Subscribin­g companies filled 56% of all their vacancies with work seekers registered on the system. But the service is hampered by a range of obstacles, including poor infrastruc­ture, which leads to incomplete records being kept, and network failures that make the system painfully slow. This affects its reliabilit­y. The bottom line Social networks remain a default method of job search for many South Africans across the labour market spectrum. But the ability to access social networks is shaped unequally by the education, class and race background.

For job seekers living in poor rural areas social networks are less helpful.

To promote more efficient job search strategies at all levels, the quality and accessibil­ity of formal labour market informatio­n needs to be raised significan­tly.

Dr Glenda Kruss is a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council. Source: http://theconvers­ation.com/

 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from South Africa