Danté Personnel Recruitment
Information Services in Boksburg

Danté Personnel Recruitment provides recruitment services Nationally and Internationally.

The nature of employment growth has importantly though, adapted to the structural changes of the South African economy through utilising an ever increasing employing number of temporary workers. The paper takes as its general focus, an assessment of the role played by the TES sector in contributing to employment and output growth in post-apartheid South Africa. Data for most of the analysis is drawn from representative labour force surveys. On the face of it TES however, appear to have absorbed a lower skill set of workers and thus provides a potentially interesting case study of a sector whose employment expansion is explicitly focused on semi-and unskilled workers. Between 1995 and 2014, the structure of the economy has resulted in employment taking on a very specific trend. The tertiary sectors accounted for the highest share of employment created since democracy, at 71.7 percent in 2014, followed by the secondary sectors workers in that year. Considered at a sector level, our results suggest that aggregate employment growth in post-apartheid South Africa has been driven by the Financial and Business Services sector on the one hand, and the Wholesale and Retail Trade sector on the other hand. If we take the Business Activities N.E.C/Other category to be representative of TES employment, it is worth nothing that annual average percent exceeded Finance and Business services sector employment growth, the national employment growth rate and indeed the growth of every single other main sector is dominant, has thus been also been a key job generator within the domestic economy. It is evident that the Business Services N.E.C sub-sector accounted for a significant share in total employment growth since 1995 and is considered to be a key driver of job creation in the South African labour market in the post-apartheid period. ARACTERISTICS OF TES WORKERS: The perception generally, is that labour brokers employ low skilled workers who are then employed under poor working conditions without an employment contract. We find that more than half of the 784 434 workers employed in the TES sub-sector in 2014 were sales and service workers, while about 26 percent were elementary workers. South Africa’s exceptionally high levels of youth unemployment, reaching 36 percent in 2014, suggests that the labour market is excluding a large cohort of young people at a far greater rate than the Finance and Business sector as well as the overall labour market. Put differently, this sector is disproportionately employing more young people than the national economy or other sectors. It is notable that 70 percent of young people employed by TES are absorbed either in to medium or low skilled occupations. This qualification and occupation data for young people suggests that the sector is a vital first port of entry into the labour market for young people, with either incomplete schooling or a Matric. For a society where youth unemployment rates regular exceed 50 percent, this role played by the sector in absorbing young people into productive employment is fundamentally important to both the labour market and the economy as a whole. We find that the number of firms with under 20 workers dominate the industry. The key conclusion drawn from this analysis is that at each of the poverty estimates, and the corresponding poverty lines, the removal of TES earnings results in more households being worse off either through and increasing poverty headcount or poverty gap ratio. We find that employment losses would result in sharply rising levels of household poverty. An important backdrop to this analysis is that it illustrates that this sector employs semi-and unskilled workers who are in households close to the poverty line. As a result TES earnings have an indirect role in the welfare of their relevant households. CONTRIBUTION TO THE ECONOMY: The TES sector has been useful to the South African economy in that it has allowed firms to adjust to the structural changes of the economy by adjusting their cost base and staffing needs in response to the business cycle. Whilst it is not possible to distinguish value add from the TES sub-sector as opposed to the Finance and Business Services sector, give the notable growth of both employment and output it is very probable that value percent for the 1995 to 2014 period, was higher than employment growth observed for all sectors. Put simply, the data suggests that apart possibly from the Community Services sector, the TES industry was over this period, the only labour-intensive sector in the South African economy.