The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is deeply concerned by the increase in unemployment for 2025’s Quarter 1 with expanded jobless now at 43.1% and youth unemployment exceeding 72%. Whilst there is normally an increase in jobs in the last quarter of each year as the festive season occurs and the retail and hospitality sectors experience a boom; this decrease in employment is nonetheless extremely worrying.
We cannot continue to normalise an economy where four out of ten South Africans cannot find work. Our unemployment levels and the inability of an economy stumbling along 1% growth annually to absorb new labour market entrants must be treated as the existential threat to the nation that it is. Government must accelerate its efforts, working with business and labour, to rebuild the state, to enable it to provide the public and municipal services the economy needs to grow, to invest in critical economic infrastructure essential to stimulate growth, expanding public employment programmes to provide a path for young people to find permanent jobs, to overhaul our skills and education regimes to ensure workers have the skills employers need, and to ramp up financing available to unlock SMMEs, industrial and export sectors.
Top of our priorities has to be ensuring Eskom can provide reliable and affordable electricity, Transnet’s capacity to transport our exports to their destinations is doubled, Metro Rail is returned to full capacity on all lines, the litany of dysfunctional municipalities are fixed and can provide essential services, and the South African Revenue Services is given the resources it needs to collect the taxes owed to the state that it requires to fulfill its constitutional mandates.
Businesses, pension and investment funds, and ordinary consumers too must play their part and buy locally produced clothes, shoes, food, furniture, cars and other goods as localisation is the most sustainable path to growing a vibrant economy.
These critical interventions need to be intensified. South Africa needs to be turned into a construction site with unemployment falling, not rising by 1% each quarter.
Matthew Parks
Parliamentary Coordinator
Cell: 082 785 0687
Email: matthew@cosatu.org.za
Cape Town, South Africa