Johannesburg - Employment creation in South Africa is still "shoddy," Standard Bank economist Shireen Darmalingam said on Tuesday.
She was reacting to the release of the quarterly labour force survey by Statistics SA earlier.
The survey revealed that about 267 000 South Africans lost their jobs between the first and second quarters of 2009.
The country's official jobless rate stood at 23.6% of the labour force in the second quarter of 2009 - a slight increase from 23.5% in the first quarter.
The survey also revealed that a total of 4.125 million people were unemployed in the second three months of this year.
Darmalingam said that at the beginning of 2001, the jobless rate was 26.4%.
Halving this would mean an unemployment rate of 13.2%.
"Admittedly, in the current global economic fiasco, unemployment rates across the world are threatening to fall off their recent declining trend and extend beyond long-term averages of the respective countries' official unemployment rates.
"A number of emerging market economies (comparable with South Africa) are exhibiting unemployment rates of 10% and below," she said.
However, she emphasised that South Africa's labour market was in a far worse quandary than its emerging market counterparts.
Moreover, with the rising unemployment rate the possibility of failing to meet the Millennium Development Goals - set in September 2000 - became all the more probable.
"In order to meet these goals, around 700 000 jobs are to be created per annum," she said.
However, what made the labour market situation inferior was the fact that there were around 700 000 school-leavers a year ready to enter the labour market.
"The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has estimated that only half of these school-leavers are likely to find employment by the time they are 24," Darmalingam said.
If one took into account that 4.125 million people were currently unemployed and estimates revealed that about 150,000 retirees left the workforce every year, it still left a balance of 550,000 a year.
"A conservative approximation, which is rather optimistic in the current economic recession, suggests that the economy could accommodate around 150 000 jobs being created per annum (the annual job creation average of the past four years), which still leaves a balance of 400 000 people unemployed."
Shockingly, this translated into 1 095 jobs that needed to be created each day to meet the unemployment needs of the school-leavers, she said.
Tuesday's data reflected the persistent distress evident in the labour market, Darmalingam added.
"While the number of unemployed declined during the quarter, the data revealed a larger proportion of discouraged workers who may simply have given up the hope of finding employment.
"Of particular significance is the fact that had these discouraged workers been added to the unemployment pool, the unemployment rate would have yielded an increase of six percentage points higher than the current unemployment rate," she noted.
- Sapa