While South Africa’s unemployment rate remains at 27.7% for the second quarter of 2017, the labour landscape in the country has worsened significantly.<\/p>\n
According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey from Stats SA for the second quarter of 2017, the country’s unemployment rate was stable at 27.7%, despite further job losses.<\/p>\n
This means that there has not been an increase of work appointments, but rather a reduction of active job seekers.<\/p>\n
The number of job seekers has declined by 37,000 people to approximately 6.3 million, reducing South Africa’s labour force participation rate to 59.9%, from 60.5% in the first quarter.<\/p>\n
There was a net loss of 113,000 jobs between the first quarter of the year and the second quarter, with 16.1 million people formally employed – down from 6.2 million before.<\/p>\n
The expanded unemployment rate – which includes an extra 3.1 million people who were available to work, but did not look for work during the reference period – increased by 0.2 of a percentage point to 36.6%.<\/p>\n
This is approximately 9.3 million people aged 15-64 who wanted to work and were available to work, but their labour was not used.<\/p>\n
According to Stats SA, the drop was driven by six of the 10 industries.<\/p>\n
The largest decreases were recorded in construction (110,000) and agriculture (40,000).<\/p>\n
However, employment gains were observed in trade (58,000), finance (17,000), manufacturing (10,000) and utilities (2,000).<\/p>\n
Provincially, the largest employment losses were recorded in Gauteng (143,000) and Eastern Cape (26,000), while Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal recorded employment gains of 32,000 and 29,000 respectively.<\/p>\n