The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) notes with deep alarm the latest Quarterly Employment and Earnings (QES), September 2025 results released by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), which show a marginal quarter-on-quarter increase of just 0.3% (29,000 jobs) in the formal non-agricultural sector. Though government and business may attempt to present this as evidence of “recovery,” the underlying data reveals a labour market in accelerating crisis.
According to Stats SA QES (2025Q3), total employment in the formal sector has fallen by 79,000 jobs year-on-year (-0.7%). Crucially, full-time jobs decreased by 21,000 in the quarter and by 72,000 over the year, confirming SAFTU’s longstanding warning: employers are steadily replacing permanent work with casualisation, outsourcing, short-term contracts, and labour broking. The 29,000 jobs gained are overwhelmingly part-time, concentrated in community services and trade, insecure jobs with low pay, few benefits, and no path to stability.
This crisis must be understood in relation to the scale of labour-market demand. According to Stats SA QLFS (2024–2025), between 1.2 million and 1.3 million people enter the labour market each year (including new graduates, school leavers, adult entrants, and returnees). Separately, the DBE Matric Report (2024) and Stats SA education indicators show that 700,000–900,000 youth enter the labour market annually, including matriculants who do not proceed to higher education and the hundreds of thousands who exit school before matric.
When set against these numbers, the QES report is catastrophic. Instead of creating 1.2 million jobs per year, South Africa is losing full-time jobs and replacing them with insecure labour. The economy is not merely failing to grow; it is structurally incapable of absorbing even a fraction of annual labour-market entrants.
The consequences are visible across the country. Retrenchments have swept through multiple industries:
- Ford South Africa announced over 470 retrenchments (Silverton and Struandale) in August 2025.
- Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa moved to cut 680 jobs and close plants in Bloemfontein and East London.
- Aspen Pharmacare initiated restructuring, threatening hundreds of jobs in Gqeberha and East London.
- ArcelorMittal South Africa (AMSA) plans up to 3,500 direct job losses, with potential downstream effects on up to 100,000 indirect jobs along the steel value chain.
- Retrenchments continue in engineering, textiles, glass, packaging, and chemicals.
These are not isolated business cycles but indicators of a structural unravelling of manufacturing, whose share of GDP has fallen below 13% (Stats SA GDP data 2025). Deindustrialisation, driven by cheap imports, high energy costs, collapsing infrastructure, and the absence of an active industrial policy, is hollowing out towns and communities once built around factories and foundries.
While jobs vanish, the state continues to impose austerity. Despite the collapse of employment, Stats SA QES shows only a 1.1% (R10.7 billion) rise in gross earnings, while real wages continue to fall because inflation outpaces wage growth. Overtime pay has dropped by 11.1%, signalling shrinking incomes and reduced working hours. Meanwhile, executives continue awarding themselves excessive salaries while workers cannot afford food, electricity, or transport.
This dual crisis, job destruction and wage erosion, exposes the complete failure of the government’s neoliberal framework. Policies like Operation Vulindlela, aimed at deregulation and investment appeasement, have delivered neither industrial growth nor work for the millions who need jobs. The result is a fragile, import-dependent economy built on cheap labour and speculation rather than production.
The latest QES data, combined with the reality that over a million people enter the labour market annually, is a national alarm bell. If the country continues shedding full-time jobs while producing only a handful of insecure positions, South Africa will face irreversible social and economic collapse.
SAFTU therefore demands the following immediate interventions:
- A massive public employment programme that creates millions of permanent, decent jobs, not expanded EPWP exploitation.
- An end to austerity and large-scale public investment in manufacturing, infrastructure, and essential services.
- Stronger labour protections to stop casualisation, labour broking, outsourcing, and the destruction of full-time work.
- A national living wage framework, ensuring no worker is condemned to poverty wages.
- Filling all vacant public-sector posts in health, education, policing, water, and municipal services posts that austerity has frozen while communities collapse.
- Industrial policy for reindustrialisation, including localisation, tariffs on predatory imports, and state-led investment in steel, autos, chemicals, food processing, and pharmaceuticals.
- Redistribution of wealth and ownership, based on progressive taxation, financial sector reform, and democratic control over key industries.
South Africa cannot recover while its productive base is collapsing, its workers are discarded, and its economic policy is directed by austerity and deregulation. A just economy must be built on full employment, decent work, industrial expansion, and strong public investment.
The QES results are a warning: the country is running out of time. SAFTU stands ready to mobilise workers and communities to demand a new economic order, one that serves the many, not the few.
Issued on behalf of the SAFTU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi
For media inquiries, contact the National Spokesperson at:
Newton Masuku:
Media Officer
Asive Dyani
0719019564
