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43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
- ArkanExplorer 5y agoHow do these people survive if they have no income?
- Wohlf 5y agoOdd jobs, unofficial employment, family, welfare. South Africa is also well known for high crime levels.
- adolfojp 5y agoPeople are employed, just not formally, and they're paid in cash. https://theconversation.com/informal-economies-are-diverse-south-african-policies-need-to-recognise-this-104586 https://theconversation.com/informal-economies-are-diverse-s... It's the same situation in many developing countries.
- joelbluminator 5y agoIts still a huge problem. Informal jobs are probably low paying and unstable.
- tomcooks 5y agoIt really depends on the job, the boss and the social context. As a quick example: the son of a restaurant owner can get informally hired as the waiter/bartender. He would get a fair share of the profits, possibly inherit the restaurant or its management, and will probably never be fired.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- donewithcoding 5y agoUSA has similar unemployment stats with subsets of their population demographics. This subset largely survives and thrives due to section 8 and EBT/SNAP entitlements.
- decremental 5y agoWell, survive maybe but certainly they're not thriving. The welfare state has all but ensured that those people will never get out of their situation. Maybe their kids have a chance but it's clearly a major contributing factor of generational poverty. It's unconscionable what it has done to black Americans. It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters as a way to help people but ultimately it only serves to make those people wards of the state.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoSo many people "make it" in the off the books economy that the welfare eligible rungs of the social ladder deal in but they can't get up to the next rung because they can't amass the capital to make a clean break and the state will screw them out of everything if they try and go legit slowly. Imagine your a highly successful under the table mechanic. You have a few under the table employees and work out of a leased space where the owners look the other way. Everything is done in cash or similar. If you want to start a "real shop" you can't just get an LLC, rent a real garage space, put up a sign and move all your tools then slowly start a rolling upgrade process to get all your stuff on the books and above the table as you acquire more profitability to absorb the overhead that entails. The city or state would instantly show up and fuck you over twenty different ways for being off the books and out of compliance. The only way to go legit fast enough is to get a loan and you can't do that because you have no assets, no history, no credit, despite the fact that you are basically already running a successful business.
- gizmo686 5y ago> It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters Has it? I don't think I have talked to a single person who likes the current state of welfare in the USA. The problem is that some people think it is too generous, and others think it is not generous enough; so we end up with a clearly dysfunctional system as it accumulates changes changes born out of polar opposite views of the problem.
- LatteLazy 5y agoTheir parents feed, house and clothe them. Edit: not sure why this is being buried. I'm not judging, it's just the answer to the question isn't it?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cpach 5y agoSeems like your explanation is only part of the truth, at least according to the other comments.
- addicted 5y agoMost likely because this answer is very wrong. You rarely have situations in developing countries where the parents are supporting adults in their mid 20s, and it's almost always the other way round. The correct answer, as others have pointed out, is the informal economy, with them taking up a bunch of odd jobs one after the other. To focus on a subset of 15-29 year olds, what do you think 15-18 year olds are doing without either being in school (which is free in South Africa) or holding jobs (which would probably be illegal)? Most likely, supplementing the family income by taking up jobs in the informal economy.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoIt does indeed happen in the developing world that adults in their mid 20s are supported by older members of their family, it just might not be their parents. In West Africa, for instance, it is common for entire families to be supported off of a couple of lucky relatives who managed to get to Europe.
- LatteLazy 5y agoGot a source, because I can't find one for that. Instead people here seem to think they're on SNAP and EBT, things only available in America and unlikely to pay all of someone's expenses...
- disruptthelaw 5y agoIn addition to the other answers here, there is a large informal economy that essentially caters for the poor. This both provides them with informal means of income but also allows the poor to access essentials cheaply. For example a typical middle class corporate worker may earn a salary and live a lifestyle that is comparable to European counterpart. This same person may employ a full time housekeeper for $350 a month and this housekeeper somehow gets by because she exists in a parallel economy of sorts.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoThere's minor versions of the same thing in the wealthier urban areas in the US so this shouldn't be a foreign concept to HN.
- disruptthelaw 5y agoYeah, I think what makes SA different is most people in the middle class economy can afford domestic staff.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoAlmost everyone in the American middle class economy can afford domestic staff.
- Nimitz14 5y agoNo they can't.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoMiddle class by the classical "very rich people who are still technically commoners" definition yes. Middle class by the colloquial "everyone who makes more than a kid flipping burgers but not enough to buy an apartment in Manhattan" definition no.
- _djo_ 5y agoPartially through the informal economy described elsewhere, and a fairly robust welfare system that provides grants and other social support to about 18 million people.
- tomcooks 5y agoHidden non-criminal economy, community and/or family support, for some even criminal activities I presume
- bumbada 5y agoSurviving in different places in the world requires different amount of work. If you live in Brazil or Cuba cold weather does not exist and you can wear a t-shirt swinsuit all year long and survive. If you live in Germany,Japan, Norway or Boston you can't do that. You need to prepare for Winter, and not just you, but your house needs to be prepared, your means of transport needs to be prepared, and so on. While Winter exist in SA, it is pretty mild for European, Asian or American standards. Also in lots of places you could have a farm and you don't need to buy lot's of things if you just live a simple life. And Africa is gigantic, with lots of resources for a population much smaller than Asia or Europe, and way younger.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y agoAfrica is big, but it's actually more densely populated than, for example, North America.
- andreynering 5y ago> If you live in Brazil or Cuba cold weather does not exist and you can wear a t-shirt swinsuit all year long and survive. As a Brazilian I have to say that you don't know what you're talking about. It's specially very cold in the winter in the south, where I live, but even in the south-west can be very cold. Only part of the country would be warm even in the winter as you said.
- akiselev 5y agoThat's a bit harsh. From a quick google: > The lowest temperature officially recorded in Brazil was −14 °C (7 °F) in Caçador, Santa Catarina state, on 11 June 1952. However, the summit of Morro da Igreja, a mountain situated in the municipality of Urubici, also in Santa Catarina, recorded a temperature of −17.8 °C (0.0 °F) on 30 June 1996 unofficially. I googled the average winter temperature for those locales and they're all well above freezing - with the exception of the mountain summits - as high as 10-20C in January! Compared to Boston (daily winter lows below freezing) or Germany/Japan (record lows in the -40s), that's basically t-shirt weather.
- blacktriangle 5y agoI can't speak to SA, but worked in Namibia which is adjacent and culturally quite similar. The various tribes own most of the land which is parceled up into farms which is then worked by massive extended families. Life outside of the cities out in the village is actually pretty good. There's basically 0 hunger since its all farms and lots of opportunities for people to run small one-off businesses to make side money. And since families are so extended, there's always a farm you can go work at. If you manage to avoid AIDS and alcolholism the life expectancy is easily 80+. Downside of course is that there's very little opportunity to move out, but the government is pushing rural education programs hard so I'm not sure how else they could deal with that. Point being, rural unemployment really isn't that big a problem, its the urban unemployment that is brutal.
- Proven 5y agoThat's almost as bad as in south EU (where the young waste more time in state-owned schools and universities)
- saddlerustle 5y agoFor comparison, this is the relevant OECD series: https://i.postimg.cc/vmPyCfNL/img4.png https://i.postimg.cc/vmPyCfNL/img4.png (via https://data.oecd.org/youthinac/youth-not-in-employment-education-or-training-neet.htm https://data.oecd.org/youthinac/youth-not-in-employment-educ...)
- Valgrim 5y agoThis chart also gives a great insight into (I'm hesitating on the word) "traditional" gender roles among young people by country. Great comment!
- igravious 5y agoYes, I was going to reply and say that. Interesting that there are marked male/female differences in Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico – followed up by less differences on the high end by Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, and then on the lower end by Slovak Republic, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Czech Republic. Weirdly enough you could say things are very out of kilter in the Czech Republic because even though the NEET rate for guys is a chart-topping 5% the rate for gals is 15%, triple the amount! (Same kind of goes for Estonia). It's a fascinating socioeconomic demographic data-set. By all accounts the Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland, or Switzerland is the place to be if you're young … (And we're all young once, right!?)
- InvaderFizz 5y ago> Interesting that there are marked male/female differences in Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico As someone living in Mexico, it is not at all a surprise to me. Stay at home mom is incredibly common here. Also, I doubt the stats capture the cash based employment economy that many women are in here. We have a maid that cleans 3x per week. We pay her in cash at the end of each day. She has a full schedule and works six days per week. I highly doubt she would show up in the statistics as employed.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoAmazing to see these statistics when, to a foreigner, South African businesses already seem to intentionally overemploy (I would assume as a way of maintaining social stability). It is not unusual for there to be twice or even three times as many people working in a shop than in Europe.
- kruxigt 5y agoSame as in Greece there are (traditionally, I don't know currently) 3 people handling every bus. One driver and two to take payments etc.
- swiley 5y ago>One driver and two to take payments etc. What the heck?
- _delirium 5y agoThis hasn't been true in decades, but yeah, buses used to have a ticket seller/collector on board (εισπράκτορας). Buses in Greek cities are busy enough that the driver can't do both jobs, like some U.S. systems do, without unreasonable stop dwell times (especially in the days when you could get change on board!). To keep things going, the driver would pull away from the stop ASAP, and the ticket seller would take payment from the newly boarded people while the bus was moving. On most buses there'd be 1 driver and 1 ticket collector, at least by the 1990s. There might be 2 collectors on long articulated buses, one near the front and one near the back. The last vestiges of that system were phased out with the drachma/euro conversion around 2000, when everything had to be changed over anyway. Nowadays most Greek cities use a proof-of-payment system, where you have to buy and/or validate a ticket yourself from self-service machines. Then roving inspectors get on buses randomly and fine people who can't produce a current ticket. The old system has been gone long enough that there are nostalgia articles like, "Do you remember the days when buses had an 'eispraktoras'?". The last two photos here show a ticket collector station at the rear door, which would have a cash drawer under the counter for making change: https://www.enimerotiko.gr/ellada/thymasai-tote-poy-ta-leoforeia-eichan-eispraktora-kai-to-eisitirio-liges-drachmes/ https://www.enimerotiko.gr/ellada/thymasai-tote-poy-ta-leofo...
- eliseumds 5y agoSame situation in Brazil at the moment, around 40% of the productive population working informally: https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-noticias/2012-agencia-de-noticias/noticias/30235-com-pandemia-20-estados-tem-taxa-media-de-desemprego-recorde-em-2020 https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-noticias/2012-.... Uberization at an extreme level.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoThis was posted here on HN a few days ago about the situation in Brazil: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/the-brazilianization-of-the-world/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/the-brazilianizat...
- offtop5 5y agoI know on a personal level the best thing you can ever do is avoid people like this. LA, my hometown is full of people who simply don't want to do anything. They have a nasty tendency to introduce chaos, and not appreciate anything done for them. One of my elder male relatives lived with his mother up until he was 50 and she died. He then immediately purchased a new truck , took out high interest quick cash loans against the home and lost everything within a few years. You don't want idiots like this in your life. Once I moved to Chicago I had no trouble finding fantastic friends and an amazing partner with a great career( real life only, I've never meet anyone online with a job) . You become the people you surround yourself with.
- typon 5y agoAre you really suggesting that the reason 43% of South African youths are unemployed is because they're lazy?
- wcfields 5y agoThe dog whistling in that the parent comment is deafening.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ddoolin 5y agoI'm honestly speechless in trying to come up with some reply to it. It's one of the most tone-deaf replies I've ever read on this site.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoSomeone who spent time in South Africa, I think it’s funnier that he suggest I try and avoid 43% of young people.
- offtop5 5y ago>Are you really suggesting that the reason 43% of South African youths are unemployed is because they're lazy? Not at all, it's structural problem. I've seen this in LA as well and it's the number one reason I left. Since I lack the personal capacity to fix LA, I no longer live there. If anything if you live in a city or a nation where unemployment is rampant , you just need to leave. Not worry about what the government is going to do to fix it.
- lunchladydoris 5y agoIt's also not some new phenomenon. The chart goes back to 2012 and is basically flat over the last nine years. I'd be interested to see the same chart (a) going back another 10-20 years and (b) showing older age groups.
- viraptor 5y agoThe article mentions: > the solution is relatively available - get youth to first complete high school and then be equipped with skills they can use to earn a living But is it? Does SA actually have lots of jobs waiting for post-high school people? With requirements which are not trainable in a few months to people who haven't completed high school? I'm finding it hard to get answers with public statistics. Looking at https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/unemployed-persons https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/unemployed-persons for example it seems like SA lost a few million of both unemployed and employees people last year...
- hkai 5y agoIf you were starting a business, like a software company or even, I don't know, a bakery, would you start it in South Africa? No. Some countries have a shortage of people. They're hiring, but they can't find people. However, South Africa has a shortage of businesses. That shortage makes people useless: they're not hired, nobody needs them. Solution: create policies that favor businesses. Employment goes up, quality of life goes up.
- disruptthelaw 5y agoThere is a shortage of skilled workers and there is a surplus of unskilled workers. Google “skill shortage South Africa” or something like that for more info. I don’t think there is an easy solution to bringing that gap, but I’m sure getting the basics right (ie a decent education system) would help a lot.
- blacktriangle 5y agoNot persecuting your population of skilled workers would have also been a good strategy for South Africa.
- disruptthelaw 5y agoYes I don’t think anyone here disputes the historical cause.
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- bumbada 5y agoA friend of mine organized a safari business in SA. It was a normal thing for the workers he had to receive the salary pay and disappear for a week until they had burned it, and then will come back. So he had to pay different people at different times and talk with the women in their environment in order for his business to work.
- geomark 5y agoSounds familiar. When I was building my house (not in SA) the construction workers would often disappear after getting paid. I would go looking for them in the village and find them on a bender. They would come back when they needed more booze money. It was pretty obvious why they did not have many opportunities to get ahead, and never would.
- linuxftw 5y agoGet ahead to what? What is it that those people should seek?
- AlgorithmicTime 5y agoPerhaps some stability and savings.
- nojokes 5y agoHaving seen such a problem elsewhere, mostly having a stable life, normal family, educated and fed kids etc. Also naturally no addiction that is wasting your life away.
- geomark 5y agoYeah, pretty much this.
- sangnoir 5y agoDo you know how much where they being paid? In my experience, this only happens when the wages are very low. I don't know the direction of causality: do higher wages motivate workers not to be more professional, or do low wages result in the 'good' workers avoiding those jobs? Even in the US, a lot of minimum-wage McJobs have relatively high levels of absenteeism
- alexgmcm 5y agoYou find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% now.[1] It's pretty sad - young people are living with their parents into their thirties and not having children until their 40's if at all, fuelling a massive decline in the birth rate to one of the lowest in the world at around 1.3 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman[2] [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/youth-unemployment-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/youth-unemployment-rate [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033179/fertility-rate-spain-1850-2020/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033179/fertility-rate-s...
- joelbluminator 5y agoIt sucks but it seems to be where we are anyway headed in a few decades, you simply do not need so many workers, at least not in how the job market is shaped now.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoYou don't really need more people than we have currently. We're deplete resources faster than making them.
- KirillPanov 5y agoIt's really, really weird that nobody ever talks about this (your first sentence).
- pmastela 5y agoYuval Noah Harari argues the same [1]. Whereas the 20th century was a century of workers fighting exploitation, now the 21st century might be workers — or more generally people — fighting irrelevance. When so much work can be performed by machines, human labor will not be necessary like it was before. 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-n...
- tziki 5y agoI'm surprised to see the portion of NEET is much higher for women. Any idea why this is? Do they not count women who are full time mothers?
- michaelt 5y agoStatisticians have about a dozen different definitions of unemployment, depending on how they count retired people, full time parents, people caring for relatives, people on long-term disability, people with part-time jobs, people doing voluntary work, people like actors who are between jobs, people who've given up on searching for work, and so on. The 'NEET' definition does not consider full-time mothers as employed.
- vivab0rg 5y agoArgentinian here. Pretty much the same numbers apply to Argentina right now.
- ttty2 5y agoAny chance to hire people there? What job portal so you recommend? Also what salaries are people happy to take there? I tried to employ some people from there but nobody wants, even with a European salary or sightly below. I found it very weird.
- abz10 5y agoI wonder how much Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) is a drag on the economy. A SA company wanted to sell my software locally but the BBBEE and other taxes killed it.
- globular-toast 5y agoIf full-time mothers are considered NEET then this is quite meaningless. Why in the hell we'd ever consider 100% employment to be a good thing is beyond me.
- greggoB 5y agoLoving how many responding here don't seem to actually realise the socio-economic situation in South Africa is vastly different to that in the US/Europe, and so immediately start making false equivalencies. As a white male from South Africa, I can assure you this wouldn't have been my reality were I still living there. Black people make up approx 80% of the population, and this would disproportionally be theirs. Reasons date back to the Apartheid regime, which deliberately kept non-whites uneducated, as well as some horrendous mismanagement under the current ANC governnment under then-president Jacob Zuma (who himself serious under-valued education in general). Just as one example: there was a famous incident where, due to some corrupt dealings, textbooks weren't able to be delivered in Limpopo (one of the provinces) for several years in a row. For many years there have been schools with 0% high school graduation rates. The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA. This makes a huge difference.
- ectopod 5y ago> The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA. A very small minority. The middle classes don't have access to reliable power, water, government bureaucracy (mail, taxes, passports), law enforcement, etc. South Africa is failing all its people.
- bingbong70 5y agoMy understanding is a small minority own all the land, this is the kind of stupid anemic growth China would've experienced without Mao's land reforms. Protip: Never the let criminal class keep/hold the majority of the land. South Africa needs land expropriation without compensation, immediately.
- bradrn 5y agoI’ve never lived in South Africa, but I have two South African parents and have visited the country several times, and can confirm that the parent comment is exactly correct. SA can come as a shock if you’re not expecting it: even just driving from Cape Town airport to the central city, the view abruptly switches from tin shacks as far as the eye can see, to houses (which in comparison are mansions) surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences. And it’s the same no matter where you travel. And this is in one of the more affluent and safe cities in SA — ‘safe’ as in, you’re not actually risking your life if you walk on the street in one of the more touristy areas. Definitely an amazing country to visit, but the inequality is utterly extreme. EDIT: Here’s an example of what I mean. [0] is a Google Street View of a bridge near Cape Town International Airport. On the one side: tin shacks. On the other side: a golf course, behind middle-class (I think) housing. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.9675053,18.5735234,3a,60y,201.49h,85.07t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snc4XpkmSf348xdJMhngNwg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.9675053,18.5735234,3a,60y,2...
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- peter_retief 5y agoI am from South Africa and can say that 43% is conservative. The official figure for youth unemployment is 75% Situation is quite dire and caused by failed political ideology similar to the failed state of Zimbabwe.
- cybert00th 5y ago> as much as South Africa has a youth unemployment problem, the solution is relatively available - get youth to first complete high school and then be equipped with skills they can use to earn a living. > With that in mind, you have to ask: why isn’t the South African government putting all their energy into this? The list of reasons are legion, but chief among them is corruption - and until those in power get past their 'it's our turn to eat' view point, we're all just wasting our breath. Source: am South African