{"id":775797,"date":"2024-06-07T15:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=775797"},"modified":"2024-06-07T14:30:38","modified_gmt":"2024-06-07T12:30:38","slug":"one-of-south-africas-biggest-employers-haemorrhaged-500000-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business\/775797\/one-of-south-africas-biggest-employers-haemorrhaged-500000-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"One of South Africa’s biggest employers haemorrhaged 500,000 jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of South Africa’s biggest employers, the manufacturing sector, has shed 50,000 jobs over the past year, bringing the total to almost 500,000 lost jobs in the last ten years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies<\/a> (TIPS), an economic research institution, stated that the overall recovery from the pandemic conceals significant disparities between economic sectors, with goods production being in a particularly precarious state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Private services, agriculture, public services, and logistics now produce more than pre-pandemic, contributing 40% of the GDP in Q1 2024, while the rest of the economy remains underwater,” it said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data compiled from Stats SA shows that the value added in construction is 17% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019, having seen a steady fall over the period. Manufacturing and retail have shrunk by 5%. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mining has seen a modest decline in tonnage sold although its revenues have fluctuated substantially with world prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has materially impacted on employment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The proportion of working-age adults with jobs increased by 1% in the year leading up to March 2024, reaching 41% in South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this rate still falls below pre-pandemic levels due to the slower pace of job recovery compared to population growth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In comparison, around 60% of the adult population in the rest of the world is employed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Job losses<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manufacturing production in South Africa has fallen well short of market expectations over the last financial year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manufacturing lost 50,000 jobs in the year to March 2024<\/strong>, according to the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS), while construction also shrank slightly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concerningly, TIPS noted that these sectors employed around half a million fewer people than in the mid-2010s and 150,000 fewer than before the pandemic.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, the rest of the economy, which consists mostly of private and personal services, retail, logistics, and social services, gained 550,000 jobs, or 4.6%, in the year ending March 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within the manufacturing industry, significant job losses were reported in the auto, glass, and non-metallic minerals sectors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transport equipment industry saw a 20% decrease with over 20,000 jobs lost, while employment in glass and non-metallic minerals also declined. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, employment expanded in the food and wood\/paper value chain, but other manufacturing industries experienced job losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite job gains in some years, the QLFS reports that manufacturing employment has dropped significantly since 2010, and recovered only partially from the pandemic downturn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, employment in the rest of the economy is now substantially above its pre-pandemic level, although it shrank over the six months to March 2024. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of South Africa’s major sectors has been haemorrhaging thousands of jobs since 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":775831,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9872],"tags":[853,1809],"class_list":["post-775797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-south-africa","tag-stats-sa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775797"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":775911,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775797\/revisions\/775911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}