This article was first published by Business Live on 20 June 2025
Why so few are hired
Unemployment is the single greatest problem facing South Africa today. It lies at the centre of South Africa’s economic stagnation, social instability, and deepening poverty. Millions are excluded from work not by a lack of opportunity, but by laws that make low-paid or entry-level jobs unlawful. If a job does not meet every legal requirement, particularly the statutory minimum wage, it may not be offered, even where both parties are willing.
The Job Seekers Exemption Certificate is the simplest, most practical, and least costly means of enabling millions of unemployed South Africans to find work. If implemented in full, its success is not speculative; it is a matter of economic logic.
A simple legal adjustment
The Job Seekers Exemption Certificate (JSEC) would allow anyone unemployed for six months or more, along with all new entrants to the job market, to work on freely agreed terms; that means no minimum wage laws or rigid sectoral rules would apply. The job must be lawful and safe, but the terms would be set by the jobseeker and the employer, not by government edict.
No subsidy. No special programme. Just legal permission to work when no one else will hire you.
A conservative estimate of JSEC job creation
South Africa has 8.2 million unemployed people, and roughly three-quarters have been out of work for more than a year. Add another 3.5 million discouraged work-seekers, many of whom would try again if the rules changed. That gives us about 8.9 million potential JSEC candidates right now.
Each year, 700,000 more people enter the labour market, mostly school-leavers. Over three years, that adds 2.1 million, bringing the total eligible group to roughly 11 million people.
If the JSEC were implemented, how many of those 11 million people would be hired?
Understanding the potential
When the cost of hiring falls, employers hire more people. That is not theory; it is common sense. It happens with bread, petrol, and labour alike. Economists call this responsiveness labour demand elasticity – how much hiring rises when barriers fall.
In countries that have studied the phenomenon, such as in the OECD countries, the elasticity of demand for low-skilled labour usually ranges from –0.4 to –0.8. That means a 10 per cent drop in the cost or risk of hiring leads to a 4 to 8 per cent increase in jobs. But we do not need to use complicated equations.
We can simply apply realistic estimates.
If just 15 per cent of the JSEC pool were to find work that would mean 1.65 million jobs.
If 25 per cent were hired, that would mean 2.75 million jobs.
If employers absorbed 40 per cent, which is possible in high-employment sectors such as agriculture, domestic work, construction, and small-scale services, the total would exceed 4.4 million new jobs.
Even after adjusting for some job displacement, a net gain of three million new jobs in three years is a conservative and well-supported estimate.
What sort of jobs?
The jobs created would not be made up or paid for by the government. They already exist in the real world, but current laws make them illegal or too costly to offer. They would appear in apprenticeships, retail, deliveries, security, home maintenance, cleaning, caregiving, taxi services, agriculture and hundreds of micro-enterprises.
These are the very jobs that often provide a first payslip, basic experience, and a path to better jobs later. They are entry points for long term unemployed and new entrants into the labour market currently sealed off by regulation.
More than we can measure
The figures above do not include the new businesses, tasks, and labour-intensive services that would arise spontaneously once it becomes lawful to hire people for small, low-paid, or entry-level jobs. Many of these jobs do not exist today because they are illegal under current law. The JSEC would not only absorb existing jobseekers; it would unlock whole categories of economic activity, especially in townships, rural areas, and informal sectors, creating work that would never have existed otherwise.
This makes the estimates presented here conservative by design. The real number of jobs created are likely to be significantly higher.
Nothing else comes close
Government employment schemes are too small, too expensive, and too slow. Tax incentives rarely reach the informal economy. Learnerships are few and selective.
The JSEC is different. It is immediate, voluntary, and vast in scale. It could put millions of people to work at no cost to the state, replacing regulation with freedom, and paperwork with productivity.
