Cosatu concern about slow employment growth 06- 28 - 06

COSATU concerned about slow employment growth

Jobs and Poverty Campaign to be intensified

COSATU is concerned that the latest Quarterly Employment Statistics (QES) again show only very slow growth in formal employment, despite the growth in the economy in the past six months.

According to the QES, formal employment rose only around 300 000 in the year to March 2006. That is only about half as fast as required to meet the ASGI-SA target of halving unemployment by 2014.

The data confirm our concerns about the September 1995 Labour Force Survey (LFS). This particular LFS was coupled with a survey on informal employment, which apparently led to a significant exaggeration in the growth in the informal sector. As a result, it substantially overstated overall employment growth.

The income figures in the QES show that average monthly pay in the formal sector remains well under R2000 a month, although it has risen appreciably in the past year.

Overall, the QES findings again underscore that the growth spurt of the past few years has done far too little to benefit the majority of working people and the poor. Instead, as in the past, economic growth continues to enrich a minority, without substantially denting unemployment or creating decent work on the scale needed to address the massive national crisis of joblessness and poverty.

For this reason, and in view of the refusal of business and the state to address the concerns of workers, the unemployed and the poor, COSATU will continue, and take to new heights, its Jobs and Poverty Campaign, which demands much stronger measures to support equitable growth.

COSATU's May 2006 Central Executive Committee meeting adopted a programme of action for the next phase that will intensify the Campaign until all our demands are met. This will include:

Submitting a new Section 77 notice to NEDLAC calling for negotiations on our demands;

Discussing the Campaign at COSATU's forthcoming Provincial and National Congresses;

Convening local shops steward councils, socialist forums, workplace and industrial general meetings to plan how to take the fight to the companies and government departments that have been blacklisted by the local shop stewards' councils.

Organising meetings of the mass democratic movement to form a broad coalition against unemployment and poverty;

Convening a bilateral meeting with the ANC to discuss our demands.

The CEC called on COSATU members to use all these meetings to debate the suggestion that we intensify the Jobs and Poverty Campaign through strikes for two or three days a week, for as long as it takes to get a response to our demands.

All these debates will culminate at our National Congress on 18-21 September, which will adopt a programme of action for the coming three years to ensure that the second decade of democracy belongs to workers and the poor.