{"id":114026,"date":"2016-02-24T19:03:36","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T17:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=114026"},"modified":"2016-02-24T17:03:54","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T15:03:54","slug":"government-vs-private-sector-salaries-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/114026\/government-vs-private-sector-salaries-in-south-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Government vs private sector salaries in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Workers in the South African public sector are more educated, older, more skilled, and more diverse\u00a0when compared to the formal private sector – which translates into a better salary.<\/p>\n

These are some of the findings in a new research paper published by the Development Policy Research Unity from the University of Cape Town, investigating the demographic, employment and wage trends of South Africa.<\/p>\n

The university department said there are currently around 15 million people employed in South Africa – up from\u00a012.4 million in 2004.<\/p>\n

This increase of 2.6 million over the last decade is equivalent to an average annualized growth rate of 2.3%.<\/p>\n

Despite a growth in jobs, overall unemployment in the country has worsened, with as many as 8.2 million people jobless.<\/p>\n

Certain industries have seen a massive decline over the past decade – particularly the primary sector (agriculture and mining) which have seen close to 720,000 jobs lost between 2001 and 2012.<\/p>\n

The tertiary sector picked up the slack, however, adding 2.72 million jobs over the same period – most of which were created in the community, social and personal services industry – predominantly made up of public sector employment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Government has become one of\u00a0South Africa’s biggest job creators: the total number of public sector employments has increased from 2.16 million in 2008 to 2.69 million at the end of 2014 \u2014 an increase of more than half a million jobs in a six year period.<\/p>\n

This is further broken down into 2.37 million people who are employed by government directly,\u00a0and\u00a0322,960 who are employed by state-owned enterprises.<\/p>\n

Thus the main drivers of public service jobs has been within national, provincial and local government structures, rather than within SOEs, which have remained fairly stable in their overall employment.<\/p>\n

Comparing the public sector demographics to the private sector yielded some interesting findings- most notable of which\u00a0was that, on average, public sector workers get paid more than their private sector counterparts.<\/p>\n

The real monthly wage of an average public sector employee is R11,668 compared to R7,822 for an average private sector worker.<\/div>\n

“In addition, public sector wages have less dispersion than private sector wages, indicating a lower level of wage inequality within the public sector,” the group said.<\/p>\n

This is because public sector workers are more unionized than private sector workers, which gives them more power to negotiate wages.<\/p>\n

For non-unionized workers, the average real monthly wage in the private sector is statistically significantly larger than that of the public sector, by a margin of ZAR952 (USD99).<\/p>\n

“This suggests that the public sector premium is negative, or at the least disappears, for workers that do not belong to a union,” the researchers said.<\/p>\n

\"Wage

Wage distributions for public and private (non-public) formal sector employees, by union status (2013)<\/p><\/div>\n

Other interesting demographic findings:<\/p>\n