The Latest Jobs Stats and Directions of SA
For those living in the dysfunction, competence beats ideology every time.
My high school debate coach always fondly quoted Mark Twain’s famous quote:
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Twain referred to his own difficulty in understanding figures, and to the idea that statistics can have persuasive power, even when used inappropriately. I too am in Twain’s boat, hence why I went to study law, to avoid wrestling with numbers for a living. Yet here I am delving through the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey.
Following the latest job stats release most headlines read “Unemployment worsens to 33.2%”. In the short term, that’s not wrong. Compared with the first quarter of this year, another 140 000 people have joined the ranks of the unemployed. But compared to this time last year to now, and the official unemployment rate is down slightly, from 33.5% to 33.2%. Year-on-year unemployment has dropped but measured quarter-on-quarter it has increased.
Agriculture
South Africa’s job market is not a straight line. It’s a tide, rising and falling with the seasons. Agriculture alone still has the heft to move national statistics. In the second quarter, maize is in the ground but not yet in the silo, and seasonal workers are mostly at home. This is why Stats SA likes year-on-year comparisons for certain sectors because they strip out the planting-and-harvest whiplash.
But seasonal patterns can’t explain everything nor does it cover the fact that South Africa continues to experience a massive joblessness crisis. The formal sector grew by 34 000 jobs, trade by 88 000, and construction by 20 000. On the other side, community services shed 42 000 jobs, finance lost 24 000, and agriculture itself shed 24 000. More troubling is that the number of unemployed people continues to increase faster than the number of employed. The labour force grew by 159 000, but only 19 000 of those found jobs. The rest joined the job queue or gave up looking for a job entirely.
There are two further numbers that should keep us all awake. First, the absorption rate, which is the share of working-age South Africans who have jobs, which is stuck at about 40%. That is a long-term scar. Even in “good” quarters, six out of ten working-age people are not employed. Second, youth disengagement is staggering. The NEET (not in employment, education or training) rate for those aged 15–34 is 43.9%. Almost half of young adults are not studying, training, or working.
Since the mid-2000s, the official unemployment rate has been stuck between the high twenties and low thirties, and the absorption rate has barely shifted. In other words, we have normalised a level of joblessness that would be considered a national emergency anywhere else.
The tragedy is that these are compounding losses. Every quarter of inaction on education reform, energy stability, crime prevention, or infrastructure repair doesn’t just miss an opportunity to fix it, it raises the cost of fixing the problem in the future. The longer these issues fester, the more entrenched joblessness becomes, and the more expensive it will be to undo.
Western Cape
Amid the gloom, there is one provincial shift worth noting. The Western Cape has overtaken KwaZulu-Natal as the province with the second most employed people but still only halfway to the total employed in Gauteng. The Western Cape is also still the province with the lowest unemployment rate, by some distance (at 27% vs 39.2% the closest being Gauteng). Unless the wheels come off completely, and nothing in the numbers suggests they will, that provincial growth by the Western Cape is likely to grow.
What is striking about the Quarterly Labour Force Surveys each three months is how it plays directly into “right direction/wrong direction” opinion polling, one of the most reliable predictors of voter behaviour. This is even more important in the build up to the next local government elections expected to be held late 2026 or very early 2027. If you believe your city or province is heading in the right direction, you’re far more likely to stick with its current leadership. That is why, despite the noise many in the media and on social media make about the Democratic Alliance, painting it as either a milquetoast “ANC-lite” outfit or a heartless neoliberal clique, the party’s support tends to hold or creep upwards in places it governs and elsewhere where people see the difference.
When residents compare their lot to the national average - especially on jobs, crime, and infrastructure - the contrast is stark. In most DA-run metros and provinces, the basic machinery of government still works. That alone makes the DA outliers in a country where “working” is not the default setting.
In response to the DA it’s easy to cite ideological purity tests that no real-world government can pass. That’s especially tempting if you’ve never run anything more complex than a Twitter account. Governing, unlike posting, is a contact sport. You inherit or work with broken systems, you wrestle with limited budgets, and you try to keep things moving in the right direction without burning the engine and while the other engines around you stall. Perfection is never on the menu when you actually govern and therefore mere competence and accountability is already a massive victory. Ideological debates are a distant third in importance when set against the primary challenge of simply keeping the machinery of government running. You can argue endlessly about the ideal blueprint, but if the lights are off, the taps are dry, and the streets are unsafe, theory is irrelevant. In a country where the basics are so often botched, delivering the fundamentals is in itself revolutionary.
In fragile or failing states, ideology is a luxury and debates over the perfect economic blueprint are academic. You can’t build social democracy without electricity, and you can’t run a free market if the roads to the markets are impassable. This is why South African voters, whether in Cape Town or Gqeberha, will increasingly reward whoever can simply keep the basics functioning. For critics obsessed with doctrinal purity, that’s unsatisfying. But for those living in the dysfunction, competence beats ideology every time.
Conclusion
The broader problem is that national South Africa is not moving in the right direction. The fundamentals - energy security, crime prevention, infrastructure maintenance on a municipal level - are not improving fast enough to change the trajectory. Until they do, the labour market will keep doing what it’s done for a decade, rising in some quarters, falling in others, but never moving far enough to matter and generally sliding downwards.
If the “right direction” question were asked at the national level today, most South Africans would say “wrong”. But in parts of the country, notably in the Western Cape and DA-run municipalities, the answer is often “right” particularly when compared to its neighbours. That perception, grounded in lived experience rather than ideology, is why the DA’s provincial and municipal footprint is likely to grow, however much its critics fume. In politics, as in job creation, reality tends to outlast rhetoric.
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This cover image was created using ChatGPT.