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Job seekers wait beside a road for casual work
The unemployment rate has decreased to 32.1% in the third quarter of 2024 from 33.5% in the second quarter.
According to Statistics South Africa, the number of discouraged work-seekers increased by 160 000 and the number of people who were not economically active for reasons other than discouragement, increased by 54 000 between the two quarters.
According to Stats SA Quarterly Labour Force Survey Q3, 214 000 people were not economically active.
Meanwhile, there were employment gains in the same period in the formal and informal sectors as well as the agricultural sector.
🧵 South Africa’s #unemployment rate decreased by 1,4 percentage points to 32,1% in Q3:2024.
#StatsSA #ZAQLFS pic.twitter.com/xaNud5WE60— Stats SA (@StatsSA) November 12, 2024
Small businesses
PWC Senior Economist Xhanti Payi says the informal sector is seeing an increase in employment, as more people open small businesses due to the high unemployment rate.
The Quarterly Labour Force Survey shows that the number of persons employed in the formal sector increased by 122 000 in the third quarter and the informal sector employment increased by 165 000 over the same period.
Payi elaborates, “I think actually more of the numbers seem to suggest that more jobs are created in the informal sector as important, just to recognise what the informal sector, it’s those small businesses were probably not paying tax or those individual workers or people who work for their own accounts. and that’s an important trend. that has happened actually, since the global financial crisis, since certainly since the Covid incidents, because that was somewhere where everybody was told – look, it looks like on your own you’re gonna have to look for jobs so you have to create employment.”
