The Lure of Ill-Fitting Unemployment Statistics: How South Africa’s Discouraged Work Seekers Disappeared From the Unemployment Rate

ABSTRACT

Unemployment refuses unambiguous definition. Its statistical representation is always open to contestation, especially where labour markets differ from the Western-industrial norm. Why do countries adopt international standards even if they may fit local conditions poorly? South Africa is an exemplary case to answer this question. When Apartheid ended in the early 1990s, South African statisticians embraced the new emancipatory spirit. Their broad unemployment indicator defied international conventions but did justice to the marginalised Black population, and to Black women in particular. Since then, however, South Africa has fallen in line with the much narrower definition of the International Labour Organization (ILO), in spite of widespread criticism. Why? We find that ILO standards were not forced upon South Africa. Instead, South African statisticians themselves embraced international standards to repel charges of arbitrary or politically motivated numbers. Counterintuitively, international standards become alluring precisely when doubts about statistics’ fit with local conditions are the greatest.

KEYWORDS:

• International standards
• political economy
• Sociology of quantification
• South Africa
• unemployment

Acknowledgements

This research is part of the FICKLEFORMS project at the University of Amsterdam. We are grateful to the team members for their support and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

After a PhD in France, Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez is now a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, working on the history of macroeconomics indicators in South Africa. Her research interests are, besides in political economy of statistics, in development and social protection, still in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Daniel Mügge is Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam. Together with a team of researchers, he studies the political roots of macroeconomic indicators and their political baggage.

Notes

1 The label ‘developing countries’ carries regrettable connotations, for example differences in countries’ advancement along a single ‘development’ path or a materialist conception of national progress. We don’t endorse those connotations. Lacking better alternatives, we simply use it, reluctantly, to designate relatively poor, non-Western countries.

2 Early in 2018, there were approximately 5.9 million officially unemployed in South Africa (actively searching for a job) as well as 2.7 million discouraged work-seekers out of a population of somewhat below 60 million (Stats SA, 2018).

3 10 years after the establishment of the Representation of Native Act in 1936, the ethnic homelands (or Bantustans) were created to assign black Africans.

4 At the time, the four largest of those conglomerates controlled 83 per cent of the companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange before apartheid ended. Their close links to the state made for a highly coordinated ‘national’ approach to economic policy.

5 Two central characters in the evolution of South African statistics have been Mark Orkin, then the Head of CSS and later the first Statistician-General of Statistics SA, and Trevor Manuel, the first post-1994 Minister of Finance.

6 One of the designers of the OHS, which initially underpinned unemployment figures, and Statistician General for a short period after Mark Orkin and before Pali Lehohla at Stats SA.

7 Linguistic difference can complicate things further. In some official languages, ‘interviewers would have translated ‘unemployed’ as ‘looking for work, [..] others [..] simply as not working’ (Stats SA, 1998, 64).

8 All the reports (OHS, LFS, QFLS) have three parts: the highlighted results, which are a table summarising the principle results of the study; some principal results, regarding employment, unemployment, and other specific information; the annexes, were all the rest of the information is delivered in tables.

9 Henceforth, the unemployed were those people, within the economically active population, who did not work during the seven days prior to the interview, want to work and are available to start work within a week of the interview, and have taken active steps to look for work or to start some form of self-employment in the four weeks prior to the interview.

10 Senior Economist at the Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies institute. She has been head of the COSATU Policy Unit, and has been involved at the Development Bank of Southern Africa and at the Economic Development Department.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Vidi grant 016.145.395]; H2020 European Research Council [Grant Number 637683].