Employment numbers still being hurt by lockdown, action needed – survey

Employment depends on lockdown levels and has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, remaining at approximately 10% below pre-pandemic levels for South Africa as a whole.

This shows that lockdown restrictions can affect the economy in such a tremendously negative way that it is difficult to recover in the course of a year.

This is part of the conclusion of a study, Labour Market Dynamics in the Era of Covid-19: What we’ve learnt from NIDSCRAM and the Quarterly Labour Force Surveys (QLFS), conducted by Reza Daniels, Kim Ingle and Tim Brophy from the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. The study was done before the third wave of the pandemic.

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The National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM) is a national panel survey of South African individuals who are contacted regularly to answer questions about their income and employment, household welfare, receipt of grants and knowledge and behaviour of Covid-19.

Recommendations

In the NIDS-CRAM survey it was clear that levels of employment where workers were retrenched fluctuated directly in response to lockdown levels. Every time the regulations became stricter, more workers were retrenched.

Based on their findings, the researchers recommend that wherever possible, the government should do everything possible to geographically differentiate lockdown levels to minimise their national impact and maximise the potential for localised economic recoveries.

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Key findings

The key findings include:

• The biggest fall in the employment to population ratio in the survey was in April 2020 during Stage 5 of lockdown, when employment fell about 15% compared to its February level.
• When lockdown levels were relaxed to Level 1, the employment to population ratio returned to about 98% of the pre-pandemic February levels in October 2020 and 99.8% of February levels in March 2021.
• 54% of people between the ages of 18 and 64 were employed in March 2021, compared to 55% in February 2020, 43% in June 2020 and 48% in January 2021.
• It was not always the same people who were re-employed, as 23% of the people who were employed in February 2020 were unemployed by March 2021, while 30% of people who were unemployed in February 2020 are now employed.
• While most men (10,283,000 in February 2020) have returned to work by March 2021 (10,282,000), women were not so fortunate. In February 2020 a total of 9,000,000 women had work, while now only 8,248,000 are now employed.
• Women are also working less hours, with 33 hours per week, compared to 35 hours in February 2020, while men were working 39 hours a week in February 2020 and 40 hours in March 2021.
• Average income has declined for men and women, with men’s salaries decreasing from an average of R9,150 in February 2020 to R8,869 in March 2021 and women’s from an average of R5,721 to R5,417.
• Employment for people between the ages of 18 and 24 showed a bigger increase from 33% in February 2020 to 35% in March 2021, while employment for people between the ages of 55 and 64 decreased from 45% to 41%.

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