Labour creates thousands of jobs for Free Staters

The department of labour has announced that it has managed to create job opportunities for over 8 000 Free State job seekers. This is out of the 96 505 job seekers who have also been placed countrywide.

The department managed to achieve this through the Public Employment Services (PES), using the electronic platform of the Employment Service for South Africa (ESSA). ESSA is an electronic platform that the department of labour uses to link job seekers and employers.

The department of labour director-general, Nkosinathi Nhleko, told members of Parliament’s portfolio committee on labour, this week, that progress and non-progress of the programme was determined by economic factors.

“We operate within a broader macro-economic environment. The volumes of placements depend on the availability of vacancies in the economy. We are also faced with another constraint, that people who are profiled could not besuccessfully matched.”

“There has to be a broader collaboration with all players in the economic sphere on how we up-skill people with relevant expertise and make them relevant in the job market,” said Nhleko.
The job seekers that have been captured on the system were 553 883, although the department had initially targeted 600 000 job seekers to be registered on ESSA. The placement target
was 450 000.

The department said they had to revise this number because it included people who needed counselling, career advice and those seeking assistance on other department’s services.
The system managed to profile and assesses 50 percent of registered job seekers within 60 days of the registration.

The provincial breakdown of placements is as follows: Eastern Cape 15 483, Gauteng 19 452; KwaZulu-Natal 8 659; Limpopo 9 627; Mpumalanga 11 077; Northern Cape 3 622; North West 11 077; and the Western Cape 96 505.

The department has reported that the number of employers registering vacancies on ESSA stood at 2 475 to date, exceeding the 2 000 target. The department through PES has also managed to register 1 162 private employment agencies (PEA) up to the end of March 2012.

Nhleko also announced that the department managed to save 15 165 jobs through its social plan interventions. This was made possible through money spent by the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) in the Training Lay-Off Scheme.

“The scheme is aimed at distressed companies due to the economic conditions and at workers who may be at risk of retrenchment. Through the Training Lay-Off scheme workers agree to forgo their normal wage to attend training programmes and to accept a training allowance during this period.”

Employers gain a financial recovery period by reducing payroll costs for a period and improve the skills levels of their workers at limited costs to the company,” said the department in a statement.
Other means used by the department to identify unemployed people includes job fairs. During these fairs, which are conducted across the country, the department targets unemployed youth who dropped out of school; those with school exit certificates; unemployed graduates; workers who are unemployed or have been retrenched.

“There are many social partners including labour and business. We are saying for the sake of our children and their future, we need to open our hands and hold each other as we move with speed to restore hope for our people,” said labour minister, Mildred Oliphant, recently.