DA says Govt ‘job service’ failing, only 2.3% found full-time employment

By Ian Ollis*

Government’s much celebrated employment agency, the Public Employment Service (PES), has hopelessly failed unemployed South Africans seeking work as only 2.3% of those registered under its purview found full time employment in the last financial year.

In reply to a DA parliamentary question, the Minister of Labour, Mildred Oliphant, stated that 618,570 unemployed South Africans registered under the PES, with only 14,634 being successfully placed in full time employment.

This means more than 600,000 unemployed South Africans placed their faith in the Department of Labour to provide access to any form of a job opportunity. Sadly, this has just become another costly but ineffective government intervention that is failing South Africans on a daily basis.

What is even more alarming is that the Department of Labour’s target for placement for this year was a measly 20 000. In a country in which 8.4 million South Africans remain trapped in unemployment, this programme has horribly missed the mark, and its impact is negligible.

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According to the Department of Labour’s Annual Report 2014/15, the primary function of the PES is “to register unemployed and under-employed work-seekers, to equip them with employment counselling to access employment, to seek and register opportunities for the absorption of work-seekers, to match them with opportunities and to refer them to employers and other institutions for potential placement and to access unemployment benefits.”

While part of the problem is the ANC-created dire economic climate in which entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises (SMMEs) are given little chance of creating real private sector jobs, the other part of the problem is actual physical access to these services.

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Of the 128 labour centres around the country which offer Public Employment Services, many of them are run down, dilapidated and inaccessible to those South Africans which need them most.

I will therefore be doing a series of oversight visits to some of the most problematic labour centres across the country, after which the DA will make concrete proposals to the Minister to improve this dire situation of joblessness in our country.

Every South African must be afforded the opportunity to find a job, which brings with it freedom, dignity, independence, and an opportunity to better one’s life. Any obstacle to such opportunity must be removed with immediate effect.

*Ian Ollis is the Democratic Alliance Shadow Minister of Labour