March sees the introduction of the new minimum wage increase by 5% which may sound like a good idea on paper, but in reality not so good. The clueless government stated that they hope to uplift those that need it most with living costs having risen sharply. Then you have the unhappy trade inions who are never happy and want much more.
Employers will tell it like it is as we are the ones facing the extra costs and that story is not so rosy as we will just not hire. The Trade Unions have been pushing for a minimum wage of R15k monthly which is roughly $820 and is utter madness.
If the minimum wages get to that level every domestic worker, gardener would be out of work within days. I know our household would be fine doing their own cleaning and as convenient this is for now having someone present on the property during the day it is definitely not worth R15K.
Looking at our staff at work we would have to let go of quite a few including the office cleaning lady. We or others would simply create a roster and everyone would take turns to cover jobs that were lost. These people would be out of work with no chance of finding work again. Every business will look at these increases in the same way as the business must come first. The difference between here and the rest of the world is most workers have no skills and most have basic education and is rare to have someone who can read and write plus a bonus of being able to count. I kid you not you find out very quickly when doing manual stock takes.
The difference why some have jobs and those that do not is when hiring companies tend to ask their staff if they know someone. You trust your staff so asking them will often get someone of a similar caliber and education which is normally a family relative. If a family has no one actively working the chances of the any family members finding employment is virtually zero. This is how the system works when dealing with unskilled workers.
The economy has been stuttering along for a number of years and one could not call it booming justifying more spend. Surely the government should be concentrating on getting the unemployed working and not coming up with ways to make a grave situation any worse. I agree with the saying the real minimum wage is zero as chances are as wages rise many will lose jobs.
The minimum wage rising does become a barrier to work as smaller businesses cannot afford to hire staff. One industry that will feel the 5% minimum wage increase is farmers who already pay for extras like housing, food and basic needs which are not counted part of minimum wages.
The official unemployment rate of which strangely enough there are more than one when you categorize them. Official is 31.7% and if you include the expanded official rate (yes there is an expanded rate) which includes those that are discouraged job seekers whatever that means it is over 40%. There is no official figure for the expanded rate and why these figures can be tweaked whenever the government needs a good feel story which we know are not true. Apparently we saw a decrease of 172 000 unemployed people which in reality could also mean these people were moved to the discouraged job seeker numbers and is probably very close to the truth. Nothing is as it seems and with the vast majority of the masses uneducated they are easily manipulated by those in charge.
The government has muddied the waters recently on how they gather the unemployment data even though everyone knows this is so they can adjust the figures to make things look better. There is no difference between "Not Economically Active" and "Outside of the Labour Force".
In my book if you are unemployed you are not working which for some reason is not all classified as one statistic and is classified as labour underutilization which is unemployed in normal language. This is 44.9% as the official number and like I have mentioned before unofficially it is well into the 60% rate.