As SA continues to grapple with a high unemployment rate crisis, the news of planned job cuts by the South African Post Office and Telkom this week will further add to the misery.
The Post Office served its 6,000 employees with letters of intent to retrench them last week and this was followed by Telkom – a partially state-owned Telecoms group – to cut its 11,500 workforce by 15%.
It was inevitable that in a depressed economy like ours where projections for growth have been revised backwards amid rising cost of living, goods and declining revenues, companies would seek ways to mitigate this.
Therefore, reducing the costs where margins of profitability are squeezed and sustainability is threatened is one of the ways employed by business to deal with a challenge confronting it. But at this juncture of a slow growth and a battered economy still reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic two years ago and prolonged blackouts, this could prove disastrous for the economy.
The point we want to make is that companies need to make hard but job saving sacrifices for the good of the country. For example costs like performance bonuses for executives and other non essential perks could be reduced in the short term to save some precious jobs. It would be the right thing to do morally and otherwise.
There is no doubt that the rising unemployment levels in this country are the single biggest threat to its stability. The more people are out of jobs the more the security of the state will be threatened as crime will most likely also increase. The dire employment outlook that has been predicted by many economists in projections about the future is therefore a huge risk not just to the government but businesses too.
The need to work together to preserve jobs could not have been more pronounced than now. Workers and their representatives as well as the government need to join forces to fight a common enemy which is unemployment and save livelihoods. This can be done through measures such as increased support from the government for small businesses hard hit by blackouts to create new jobs and compromises on the wage negotiation table.
We don’t assume that this will be as easy as a stroll in the park. But in difficult times like this we all ought to look at the big picture and be motivated to lift the country out of this depression.
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