Awkward Silence…Subject Change....

Ok, this has been fun, but the theme of wallowing in my fermented misery has left a dull thud around my mind. For you at least, I am moving on out of this space…

And so on to happier topics, let’s talk about: SA’s Screwed Up Unemployment Situation.

While jobs are being created, this mainly is happening in the service industry. An industry where people are paid not so sweetly for their hourly slaving.

“Most of these jobs are created in the services economy. This has implications for poverty, since it appears that the long-term trajectory in South Africa, as in many other countries, will be one where a large majority of people work, but also live in poverty.”
Miriam Altman, the executive director of the employment, growth and development initiative at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)

So what we are getting is poor people being paid poor wages, but at least they have a job. Something to do in the day, not enough income to pull themselves out of dependence and impoverishment.

Your tips earned should pay for your transport home. Your meagre wages pay for basics to live. You hope.

Great.

So not even when we have created the jobs, are they necessarily solving one poverty problem.

THEN, to quote Professor Haroon Bhorat, director of the development policy research unit at the University of Cape Town, “Job creation has, on average, been increasing by 1%. With the population growing at about 2,8%”.

While Rudi Dicks points out that “There are approximately 300 000 to 350 000 new entrants to the labour market each year, thus job creation will fall far short of our overall objectives of halving unemployment by 2015.

What this means: Stop pomping people!!

We do not have the ability to cope with all of us already! Making more of us, while we also seem to be willingly making Zimbabweans secondary SA citizens, means there will not be enough “middle-and-lower-income-cash” for all of us. (Was this a slight jab at the tremendous disparities of income in this country? Hmmm. Maybe.)

There is so much more about Asgisa, “the most vital of the government’s growth initiatives” in the article, that are able to depress you into hopelessness, but I think that I have managed to make a sterling subject change for now….