Working 9-5 unlikely after Covid

Studies suggest uptick in part-time work, which keeps employees in precarious positions

Full-time jobs are harder to come by than they were before the pandemic. Though experts say this might be an expected result of an economic recession, the lingering pandemic’s full effect on South Africa’s labour market remains to be seen.

Earlier this month, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) released its quarterly employment statistics, which indicated that job recovery at the end of 2020 was driven by part-time work.

According to the data — which excludes the informal business sector, agriculture, hunting, forestry, fishing and domestic services — total employment increased by 76 000, from 9 564 000 in September 2020 to 9 640 000 in December 2020.

But this slight uptick in total employment was the result of parttime jobs increasing by 87 000 during this quarter. In the same period, full-time jobs decreased by 11 000.

The data also showed that total employment decreased by 594 000 year-on-year between December 2019 and December 2020. The overwhelming majority of those jobs (565000) were full-time positions.

According to the research conducted by the University of Cape Town’s Data Fast, spanning from 2005 until 2019, the number of employed people working more than 40 hours a week — most of South Africa’s workforce — has declined over the 14 years.

In 2005 about 59.8% of workers worked more than 40 hours per week. This declined to 43% in 2019. Those working less than 10 hours a week also saw a decline in employment. Over the 14 years, there was a decrease of 53%.

The only group of workers whose numbers grew was the group working 30 to 40 hours a week. Over the 14 years, this group of workers saw a 12% increase in workers.

The university’s dataset consists of microdata from 69 household surveys conducted by Stats SA between 1994 and 2019 and the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development led by the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town.

Bianca Chigbu, who holds a PHD in the sociology of work and economics from the University of Fort Hare, said it is expected that during a downturn like the one triggered by Covid-19, there may be a rise in part-time employment. “In a year with so much turmoil, like last year — and this year — it wouldn’t be a surprise to see those already in the labour market having to renegotiate their full-time contracts to part-time contracts.”

Full-time jobs will remain uncertain, while part-time work will likely continue to grow for some years after the pandemic, Chigbu said. She added that new entrants to the labour market would likely settle for part-time work as full-time work becomes more scarce.

However, it may be too soon to tell if the Covid-induced economic downturn will cause a proliferation in part-time jobs. And the data might not be telling the whole story.

The other dataset that paints a picture of Covid-19’s effect on the South African labour market is contained in the multiphase National Income Dynamics Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (Nids-cram).

The most recent wave of Nidscram data did not find a connection between job recovery and an increase in part-time rather than full-time work. The survey’s results — which were released in February and looked at job recovery by October 2020 — were starkly different to Stats SA data released later that month. The Nidscram results found that the number of actively employed adults reached pre-covid-19 levels by October 2020

Stats SA’S quarterly labour force survey, however, depicted a far bleaker picture of Covid-19 job recovery: There were still almost 1.4-million fewer people employed in the last quarter of 2020 than in the same period in 2019, the Stats SA survey found.

Josh Budlender, who worked with other economists to make sense of the Nids-cram data’s implications on the South African labour market, said the pandemic has made getting jobs statistics very difficult. “My feeling is that we don’t really know what happened at the end of last year.”

Budlender said the Nids-cram team tried to determine whether or not job recovery was driven by parttime work by asking respondents about the number of days in the week they were working.

“We would take into account that maybe the same number of people are working, but if they were only working for half the week, that is something we would have to look at … But we didn’t look at the hours in a day, which maybe should be done.”

Though the team did not find any evidence of job recovery driven by part-time work, before reviewing the results, they did think it could be possible, Budlender said.

“We were very surprised we didn’t see that. I mean, we were super surprised with employment recovery. And then when we didn’t find any evidence that these jobs are worse, we were very, very surprised.”

Budlender says a rise in part-time jobs would be bad for the South African economy’s health if judged on its workers’ welfare.

“Part-time work is worse for workers because, for one, they’re not getting as high wages, and because it typically means that they are not getting the same protections as full-time workers … It is generally a more precarious form of employment.”

Budlender says a rise in part-time jobs would be bad for the economy’s health if judged on its workers’ welfare