Johannesburg – Global job growth will not recover to pre-Covid-19 levels until 2023, according to a report published by the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) on Wednesday.
“The ILO’s World Employment and Social Outlook report for 2021 projects that at least 220-million people were expected to be left unemployed this year, and South Africa is not spared. “In South Africa, the only country in the sub-region [sub-Saharan] for which data are available for all four quarters of 2020, informal workers [both male and female] were disproportionately affected, particularly in the second quarter,” the report reads.
“The worst-affected sectors in terms of informal employment losses were trade, transport, accommodation and food services, and business and administrative services for men; and social, community, personal and other services for women. As explained above, given that South Africa’s informality rate is well below the regional average, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on informal workers and enterprises in the rest of the sub-region is likely to be even more pronounced.”
The ILO said countries needed a comprehensive and co-ordinated strategy, based on human-centred policies, and backed by action and funding.
“There can be no real recovery without a recovery of decent jobs,” said ILO director-general Guy Ryder.
The ILO’s report came in a week in which data from Statistics South Africa showed that the unemployment rate in the country rose to 32.6% in the first quarter of 2021 from 32.5% in the previous period.
It was the highest jobless rate since comparable data began in 2008 as the number of unemployed persons increased to 7.2-million.
The expanded definition of unemployment, including people who have stopped looking for work increased to 43.2%, up from 42.6% in the prior period.
The data also showed that youth unemployment rate, measuring jobseekers between 15 and 24 years old, hit a new record high of 63.3% in the first three months of this year.
More worryingly, the expanded definition of youth unemployment surged to 74.7%.
Johann van Tonder, an economist at Momentum Investments, said: “Much more than the presidential youth programmes will be needed to alleviate the problem. One way is to introduce rapid economic reform implementation. These reforms have already been announced by the government, but now need to be implemented.”
Follow @SundayWorldZA on Twitter and @sundayworldza on Instagram, or like our Facebook Page, Sunday World, by clicking here for the latest breaking news in South Africa. To Subscribe to Sunday World, click here.
Sunday World
