Terreblanche,+Independent,+COSATU+gears+up



=Wrangle over jobless numbers continues as Cosatu gears up for a nationwide strike over job losses=


 * Christelle Terreblanche **

Sunday Independent, May 29 2005 at 01:14PM
As Cosatu gears up for a nationwide strike over job losses, experts have confirmed that all the evidence points to an unemployment figure of between 40 and 50 percent.

They were responding to President Thabo Mbeki's questioning of unemployment statistics.

Writing in his capacity as ANC president in the online publication ANC Today, Mbeki quoted statistics that supposedly show that for at least a decade the economy has both shed and created jobs, with the number of jobs created exceeding the jobs lost through retrenchment, and that unemployment has increased because of poor labour absorption of the increased number of job seekers.

This week Mbeki again quoted statistics from another new survey that shows a growth in jobs. He queried even the narrowest definition of unemployment used by Statistics SA (just over 26 percent), suggesting that too many non-job-seekers had been counted as unemployed.

A statistician, Professor Karel van Aardt of Unisa's Bureau for Market Research (BMR), said the contention that unemployment was above 40 percent was based not only on official figures, but on a large number of studies conducted on a continuing basis, including the All Media Product Survey (Amps) and the Labour Force Survey.

He said there was some confusion over which figure was accepted by the ruling party. In discussion documents the ANC released last week ahead of its general national council meeting the figure is put at 40 percent.

Stats SA uses two figures; one based on the stricter definition of unemployment excluding those not actively looking for a job (generally about 28 percent), and the expanded figure of over 40 percent that includes those who may or may not be actively hunting for work.

"Amps figures and the statistics based on the latest census indicate high levels of unemployment," Van Aardt said. "The president does not seem to agree with either the ANC documents or Stats SA's figures".

He assumed Mbeki was questioning whether there were too many people classified as active job-seekers, thus loading even the smaller definition results. But Van Aardt believes the opposite might be true: that many people no longer actively looking for a job may well take one if it was offered.

"The unemployment figure is clearly between 40 and 50 percent, while the latest figures such as those released this month by Global Insight indicate that the labour absorption capacity of the economy and employment are both declining. At the same time there is an increase in casualisation of workers and more contract work," he said.

Dr Haroon Borat, the director and associate professor at the University of Cape Town's development policy research unit, agreed that the president was trying to get to grips with whether people were being captured as unemployed when they were not.

"He is saying South Africa's economy in many respects looks similar to Brazil's and India's, yet they have much lower unemployment. So there may be a problem with capturing extra people," Borat said.

He advanced two reasons to explain the difference: "India has a huge subsistence agriculture sector, while Brazil has an extensive informal sector. We don't have a large subsistence agriculture base and the informal sector is very small by the standards of comparable developing countries."

One of Cosatu's main bones of contention and reason for the industrial action is the government's proposal to relax labour rules in the informal sector to boost employment.

Cosatu said this week it rejected "the tendency to use limited private-sector studies rather than national data. The use of these data by the government seems to reflect a combination of desperation and denialism, because the official statistics paint a realistic picture of the crisis faced by the majority of people".

This article was originally published on page 2 of Sunday Independent on May 29, 2005


 * From: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20050529125251154C260854