Kevin O’Grady and Rob Rose

AT LEAST 1000 new jobs are being created in SA every day — enough to absorb all new entrants into the labour market, a new study shows.

The findings suggest that jobs are being created at a faster rate than is reflected in the official employment figures and that the economy may already be growing at the 6% annual rate sought by government, as it tries to reduce the rate of unemployment.

"The South African economy is a heck of a lot bigger than most people expected," T-Sec chief economist Mike Schussler said yesterday, as he released his South African Employment Report, commissioned by trade union Uasa.

The study delves into the records of the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), which are not used by Statistics SA in the calculation of the official unemployment rate of 26,5%.

Schussler said UIF records show 871111 new commercial employees registered with the fund between January last year and August this year — or about 46000 new registrations every month for the past 20 months.

Adjusting the figure for likely late registrations reduced this to about 30000 a month, enough to cater for the 360000 new entrants into the labour market every year.

Factoring in workers not covered by the UIF’s "commercial employees" category, such as domestic workers, public servants, the self-employed and those who earn only commission, suggested there were as many as 9-million people with jobs in SA.

This was much more than the "biggest estimate to date of 8,3-million, according to (Stats SA’s) Labour Force Survey", Schussler said. "This substantially changes the picture of the South African labour market."

The new numbers could help explain "what has happened to new car sales, why house prices are at these ridiculous levels, why three times as many people are flying through Johannesburg International Airport, why VAT collections are so much higher than expected," he said.

He was referring to an array of data and anecdotal evidence that some economists have already said points to much faster economic growth than the 3,5%-5% reported by Stats SA during the past year.

"We’ve underestimated the economy for far too long and we must start getting the growth rates right," Schussler said.

Although the job-creation rate was encouraging, it was not enough to achieve government’s goal of halving unemployment by 2014. To do this, 60000 jobs needed to be created every month, he said.

Raymond Parsons, convener for the National Economic Development and Labour Council, said that Schussler’s research "underscores why it is essential to have better official data on employment trends, which have been notoriously unreliable".

However, he warned that while it was plausible that overall growth had been underestimated, this did not diminish the need to put more muscle into creating new jobs.

Congress of South African Trade Unions chief economist Neva Makgetla said Stats SA’s quarterly employment statistics, which exclude informal and farming jobs, showed an increase of 30000 jobs a month in the second quarter of this year — but it was sustaining this growth that was vital.

She also warned against relying too heavily on the UIF data "rather than the Labour Force Survey for the year to March, which showed no growth in formal sector jobs".