The South African labour market, 1995–2015
View/ Open
Date
2016Author
Festusa, Lyle
Kasongo, Atoko
Moses, Mariana
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This study investigates the changes in the South African labour
market in the post-apartheid period. While unemployment
increased over the 1995–2015 period, employment also increased.
Nonetheless, the extent of employment increase is not rapid
enough to absorb all net entrants into the labour force, resulting
in increasing unemployment, or an employment absorption rate of
65.3%. Unemployment is concentrated in specific demographically
and geographically defined groups, most notably Africans, the
lowly educated and those aged below 30 years, residing in rural
areas in Gauteng. Finally, four worrying findings are observed:
youth jobseekers aged below 30 years struggle to find their first
job; chronic unemployment is more serious for the relatively older
jobseekers (aged 45 years or above) with past work experience;
employees working for small, medium and micro enterprises still
stagnate at approximately 3.5 million; and jobseekers from the
older age cohorts are less likely to actively seek work by enquiring
at workplaces and answering job advertisements.