So there’s good news and bad news. According to figures released today: in January, our economy created 80 000 jobs, which is a significant rise from the end of 2011, but still significantly short of government targets. What’s the situation?

Any political analyst worth their salt will tell you that one of the larger thorns currently embedded in the government’s side is our relatively high level of unemployment (23.9% at the end of last year), coupled with their increasingly hollow sounding promises to energise job creation. Subsequently, this is an issue that the opposition routinely roast them for.

So the good news, according to the Adcorp Employment Index, released today, is that all sectors of employment saw growth last month, at a nett improvement of 5% on last month:

• Temporary work grew at a rate of 7% and now represents 30.1% of the total workforce
• Agency work grew at 8%
• The wholesale and retail trade grew almost 14%
• Transport and logistics 9%
• Government employment grew 3%
• Employment in high-skilled categories such as management and professionals grew almost 5%.
• The number of clerks, service workers and sales and marketing staff increased by 8%

The bad news is that this growth is still well short of what’s needed to get us back to our 2009 pre-financial crisis level – around 420 000 new jobs will be needed for that.

[Source: TIMES Live]