Irvin Jim slams government over unemployment crisis

General Secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), Mr Irvin Jim, on Wednesday launched a scathing attack on the ANC government saying the current unemployment crisis is an indictment against the Cyril Ramaphosa-led party “because it demonstrates a total failure by the state”.

“As a nation we have become accustomed to hearing these shocking statistics and we do not even react anymore. We have become numb in the face of such an abnormal situation,” Jim said.

South Africa’s unemployment rate has risen to a near-record in the second quarter of 2024, continuing a trend that has seen the number of unemployed people grow by more than 60% in ten years, official data from StatsSA indicated on Tuesday.

The unemployment rate hit 33.5% between April and June, up by 0.6% from the previous quarter, according to the agency. This figure is close to the record 35.3% reached in 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Currently our unemployment rate is higher than the Ukraine, which is a country at war, but its unemployment rate is 14,5%. The government, and the right wing Government of National Unity [GNU] have no solutions to solve the unemployment crisis because they keep implementing the same failed neo-liberal macro-economic policies,” Jim added.

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About 8.4 million people in South Africa were out of work, up from 5.2 million in 2014, said StatsSA.

The General Secretary explained that the current unemployment problem must be understood against a backdrop of extreme inequality, “where a handful of billionaires control the economy and are obscenely wealthy, yet they are surrounded by millions of people, who are drowning in poverty”.

Meanwhile, the South African government is continuing with its rhetoric saying it is tackling poverty and unemployment, without providing nor implementing any substantial solutions.

Jim argued that the unemployment figures are a reflection of a government that has given up on finding meaningful solutions to end the triple challenges facing the working class majority.

“The ever growing pool of unemployed youth will lead to the eventual destruction of our society. Such conditions breed unrest and political instability. But we keep being fed the lie that neo-liberalism works, when the evidence is showing that it has clearly failed and it keeps failing.

“What the state, the markets and embedded corporate media will not reveal, is that high unemployment benefits capital because it means there is a pool of cheap labour which can easily be exploited. And these are precisely the conditions that capital wants because it guarantees higher profits for the billionaire class,” he said.