Johannesburg – The Congress for South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said it was not surprised that the unemployment rate increased to 32.5% in the fourth quarter of 2020, and it has blamed government’s bad policy choices.
Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) released the results from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the fourth quarter of 2020 on Tuesday, 22 February 2021.
This is the highest unemployment rate since 2008.
The number of employed people went up to 15 million, but, the unemployed also increased to 7.2 million.
Cosatu’s Sizwe Pamla said he hoped that government realized that poor policy choices had backfired.
“We hope that sanity will prevail, and they will realise that it has backfired and today’s budget will shift away from that austerity framework.”
