South Africa must put its people to work.
That requires not another adjustment at the
margins, but a fundamental change in economic direction, writes Zwelinzima Vavi.
South Africa is living through a jobs catastrophe of historic proportions.
Yet perhaps the most disturbing feature of our national debate is how thoroughly we have normalised it.
Every three months, Statistics South Africa releases the Quarterly Labour Force Survey. The numbers make headlines, politicians express concern, economists comment, and within days the country moves on.
But behind these statistics are millions of human beings: young people who have never experienced the dignity of work; graduates sending hundreds of unanswered applications; workers in their forties and fifties who lost jobs when factories and mines closed; and parents unable to provide adequately for their children.
This is not simply an unemployment problem. It is a profound national social and economic emergency.
Employment is moving backwards
The direction of travel should terrify us.
At the end of 2025, South Africa had 17.1 million people employed. In the first three months of 2026, employment col-lapsed by 345 000, taking the number employed down to 16.8 million. Instead of recovering in the second quarter, employ-ment declined by a further 16 000, leaving just 16.7 million people employed.
In only six months, therefore, employ-ment fell from 17.1 million to 16.7 million.
The measure that best exposes the dimensions of this catastrophe is expanded unemployment, which includes the unemployed and the potential labour force, including discouraged work-seekers.
Expanded unemployment rose from 42.1% in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 43.7% in the first quarter of 2026 and 43.8% in the second quarter.
Nearly 44 out of every 100 people in South Africa’s expanded labour force are either unemployed or marginally attached to the labour market. When those who have some work but need and want additional hours are included, total labour underutilisation reaches 46.3%.
This is no ordinary labour-market downturn. It is a national catastrophe.
Unemployment still has a colour, gender, age and postcode
This catastrophe is not experienced equally.
More than three decades after apartheid, unemployment continues to discriminate with brutal consistency according to the colour of your skin, your gender, your age, and where you live.
In the second quarter of 2026, expanded unemployment among black African
women stood at an extraordinary 53.1%. For black African men it was 43.3%.
Across all population groups, expanded unemployment among women stood at 48.6%, compared with 39.4% among men.
More than half of black African women in the expanded labour force are therefore unemployed or form part of the potential labour force.
Thirty-two years into democracy, unem-ployment still has a colour and a gender.
Geography compounds these inequalities. Expanded unemployment reaches 56% in North West and 54.1% in the Eastern Cape, compared with 26.1% in the Western Cape. It stands at 48.3% in Mpumalanga, 47.8% in KwaZulu-Natal, 47.1% in the Northern Cape, and 46.7% in Limpopo.
These disparities reproduce the geography created by colonialism and apartheid—the former Bantustans,
labour-sending areas, neglected rural communities and townships from which generations of black workers supplied cheap labour to mines, farms, factories, and cities.
A young black woman born in a poor
rural community therefore confronts the combined disadvantages of race, gender, age, class, and geography before she has even submitted her first job application.
We are abandoning a generation
Perhaps the most frightening measure of the youth crisis is NEET—young people not in employment, education or training.
Among South Africans aged 15–34, around 45% are neither working, studying nor receiving training. Among 15–24-year-olds, 38.2% of young women are NEET, compared with 34.6% of young men.
We are creating a generation discon-nected simultaneously from employment and the education and training systems that might provide pathways into future employment.
We cannot condemn millions of young people to economic redundancy and then express surprise at despair, crime, substance abuse, violence, and social instability.
Unemployment did not fall from the sky
This catastrophe is not a natural phenom-enon. Economic policies have consequences.
For decades South Africa has followed
an economic trajectory characterised by deindustrialisation, austerity, financialisa-tion, trade liberalisation, and inadequate productive investment.
Factories that once employed thousands have closed. Industrial towns have declined. Railway infrastructure deteriorated. Mining communities have been abandoned. Agriculture has shed labour while enor-
mous opportunities for agro-processing remain unrealised.
Instead of climbing the industrial ladder, South Africa increasingly exports raw mate-rials and imports manufactured products.
We export iron ore and import machinery. We export agricultural commodities while importing processed goods. We export minerals essential to the green industrial revolution while importing much of the technology manufactured from them.
An economy structured in this manner cannot absorb millions of unemployed people.
Macroeconomic policy must serve social objectives
At the centre of the jobs catastrophe is a basic question: what is macroeconomic policy for?
South Africa has precise targets, rules, and institutions for controlling inflation, reducing deficits, and containing public debt. The Reserve Bank is judged against its inflation target; Treasury is judged against deficit and debt projections and celebrates progress towards a primary surplus.
But there are no equally binding targets for reducing unemployment, eradicating poverty or reversing inequality.
We can specify an inflation target to a decimal point while tolerating expanded unemployment of 43.8%. A deviation from fiscal targets is treated as a national crisis, while mass unemployment, hunger, and inequality are treated as conditions to be managed.
Price stability and fiscal sustainability matter. But they are means, not ends.
A macroeconomic framework that delivers lower inflation or a primary surplus while factories close, infrastructure deteriorates, and employment falls from 17.1 million to 16.7 million in six months has not succeeded. It has stabilised the numbers while worsening people’s lives.
This is especially dangerous in a stagnant economy. Austerity can become self-defeating when cuts to infrastructure, municipalities and public services weaken demand and productive capacity, undermine investment and destroy jobs.
South Africa cannot cut its way to prosperity while nearly half its expanded labour force is unemployed or marginally attached to employment.
Nor can fiscal consolidation continue to place its greatest burden on workers and the poor while vast concentrations of wealth remain largely untouched.
South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal societies. A serious jobs and reconstruction programme therefore requires a more progressive fiscal architecture, including a wealth tax and solidarity taxes on the richest sections of society, alongside stronger action against tax evasion, profit shifting, and illicit financial flows.
Additional revenue must be tied to
measurable developmental outcomes: infrastructure, industrialisation, housing, health, education, skills development, and employment creation. It must not simply disappear into an inefficient state.
Monetary policy must also account for its employment consequences. Fighting inflation cannot be separated from fighting unemployment, particularly when inflation is driven substantially by administered prices, energy, food, transport, and other supply-side pressures that high interest rates cannot resolve.
South Africa therefore needs a macro-economic mandate with multiple objectives: price stability alongside explicit and measur-able targets for employment creation, poverty eradication, reducing inequality, industriali-sation, and sustainable development.
Every Budget and major economic-policy announcement should answer five questions:
How many jobs will this create? How
much will it reduce poverty? How will it reduce inequality? How will it expand South
Africa’s productive capacity? And who will carry the cost?
Where will the jobs come from?
That question should dominate every
Cabinet meeting, budget, and economic policy discussion.
South Africa cannot solve unemployment by waiting for economic growth somehow to trickle down into employment. We
need a deliberate programme of reindustrialisation.
Government procurement should strategically support domestic productive capacity. Trains purchased for South Africa should create South African industrial jobs. Public buses should stimulate domestic manufacturing. School furniture, hospital equipment, uniforms, pharmaceutical,s and infrastructure components purchased with public money should, wherever practically possible, support local production.
Localisation must become an instrument of industrial policy, not a slogan.
Mineral beneficiation must likewise become central to industrial policy. We cannot continue digging minerals out of South African soil, shipping them abroad, and buying back manufactured products at multiples of their original value.
Our platinum-group metals, manganese, chrome, vanadium, and other strategic minerals create enormous opportunities in the emerging green economy.
The energy transition should therefore become an industrialisation strategy. South Africa should progressively manufacture renewable-energy components, batteries, and associated technologies domestically. The transition to electric vehicles must expand our manufacturing base rather than accelerate its destruction.
A just transition cannot mean closing carbon-intensive industries in South Africa while importing green technologies manufactured elsewhere.
Put the unemployed to work rebuilding South Africa
There is an extraordinary contradiction at the centre of our crisis.
South Africa has millions desperately looking for work while simultaneously suffering an enormous backlog of work desperately needing to be done.
Millions need adequate housing. Communities need water and sanitation. Roads are collapsing. Passenger and freight rail require reconstruction. Schools, hospitals, and clinics require expansion. Thousands of abandoned mines require rehabilitation.
How can we simultaneously have millions desperate to work and enormous amounts of socially necessary work waiting to be performed?
This exposes the madness of austerity.
The state cannot cut its way out of unemployment.
We require a massive public investment programme capable of mobilising unem-ployed people to rebuild South Africa.
But this cannot institutionalise pov-
erty wages. The Expanded Public Works Programme must become a bridge towards permanent, decent employment rather than a permanent reservoir of cheap labour. Community health workers, early-childhood-development workers, and community caregivers performing essential functions should be properly employed and compensated.
Rebuild rural economies
The provincial unemployment disparities demonstrate that a jobs strategy must have a strong rural-development dimension.
The former Bantustans cannot remain reservoirs of unemployment whose inhab-itants must migrate to Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban simply to have a chance of finding work.
Land reform must be connected to agricultural production, irrigation, infra-structure, affordable finance, extension services, cooperatives, storage, and guaranteed access to markets.
But agriculture alone is insufficient. We must establish agro-processing industries close to where agricultural products are produced, simultaneously creating agri-cultural, manufacturing, logistics, and commercial employment.
Protect existing jobs and redirect capital
A jobs strategy cannot concentrate on tomorrow’s jobs while allowing today’s jobs to disappear.
Every major factory closure destroys not only direct employment but suppliers, skills, local businesses, and productive capacity accumulated over decades.
Development finance institutions must intervene before strategically important companies collapse, recapitalise viable firms where necessary, and facilitate alternative forms of ownership where appropriate.
South Africa also has sophisticated financial institutions and enormous pools of capital, yet productive investment remains inadequate. Development finance institu-tions, pension funds, and appropriate public financial instruments should increasingly support infrastructure, manufacturing, agri-culture and beneficiation.
An economy cannot speculate its way to full employment.
Decent wages create demand
Workers are also consumers.
When unemployment rises, wages stag-nate and households become increasingly indebted, domestic demand weakens. Businesses then complain that consumers are not buying their products.
This creates a vicious cycle: unemploy-ment suppresses demand; weak demand discourages investment; weak investment suppresses employment; unemployment rises further.
This is why decent wages and collective bargaining cannot simply be regarded as costs. Workers spending wages on food, transport, clothing, housing, and services generate economic activity.
A living wage must therefore form part of a broader employment and industrial strategy.
Government must lead
None of this means excluding the private sector. South Africa needs productive private investment and cooperation between gov-ernment, labour, communities, and business.
But cooperation is different from sur-rendering economic strategy to corporate interests.
Business exists primarily to generate returns for owners and shareholders. Government has a different responsibility: to advance the interests of society as a whole.
The state must possess the capacity and confidence to lead development, direct investment towards national priorities, and demand reciprocal obligations from corporations benefiting from public infrastructure, procurement, and incentives.
Declare unemployment a national emergency
South Africa possesses enormous human talent, mineral wealth, agricultural potential, financial resources, and industrial experience.
What is missing is not potential.
What is missing is an economic strategy organised around achieving full and decent employment.
History will judge our generation harshly if we allow millions of young South Africans to spend their most productive years sending unanswered job applications and gradually surrendering hope.
Mass unemployment threatens democ-racy itself. It feeds crime, gender-based violence, substance abuse, xenophobia, tribalism, political demagoguery, and social fragmentation.
We can continue managing unemploy-ment—publishing statistics, expressing concern, and waiting for growth that never arrives at the required scale.
Or we can declare mass unemployment what it actually is: the greatest national emergency confronting democratic South Africa.
Economic success cannot be defined merely by GDP growth, falling inflation, a primary surplus, or financial-market approval, while unemployment, poverty, and inequality deepen.
South Africa needs national targets for reducing unemployment, eradicating poverty, and reversing inequality carrying political weight equal to its inflation and fiscal targets.
The real test of economic policy must be whether we are reindustrialising, expanding productive capacity, rebuilding rural economies, beneficiating our mineral wealth, rebuilding public infrastructure, and progressively bringing millions of excluded South Africans into decent employment.
South Africa must put its people to work.
That requires not another adjustment at the margins, but a fundamental change in economic direction.
Zwelinzima Vavi