NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
QUESTION FOR WRITTEN REPLY
QUESTION NUMBER 457
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 25 FEBRUARY 2011
DUE TO PARLIAMENT: 11 MARCH 2011
457. Dr P J Rabie (DA) to ask the Minister in the Presidency: National Planning Commission:
With reference to a certain company's (name and details furnished) findings that Stats SA is underestimating the employment figures by 32.3%, what steps has he taken to verify the representation of the actual employment figures?
NW497E
Reply:
Adcorp economists are contesting the employment figures from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey based on either wrong assumptions or as a deliberate act with a hidden agenda. They claim that the survey underestimates employment because, in their opinion;
a) the survey does not capture Zimbabweans living in South Africa
b) the survey does not account for illegal activities such as tax evasion.
c) Statistics South Africa is political
They therefore go ahead and adjust the very information from the survey they criticise and report unemployment rate of 7% and they finally call for statistics to be privatised.
Our response is that the Labour Force Survey is a household-based survey which targets private households and workers hostels. Zimbabweans stay in private households and therefore they get captured. There is no other known method which will capture Zimbabweans other than a household based survey. To date Adcorp has not presented their method of how they adjust the figures to cater for the so called missed Zimbabweans.
Secondly Adcorp makes assumptions that about 6 million persons are engaged in illegal activities and therefore they will not accurately report employment in a survey like the Quarterly Labour Force Survey. This is a wrong assumption as there is no guarantee that persons engaged in such activities do not have a legal activity they will report as employment. We suspect that Adcorp is trapped in double counting individuals and adding numbers up using a simple arithmetic and models.
The Labour Force Framework used in measuring employment and unemployment was adopted in 1982 during the 13th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) organised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The Quarterly Labour Force Survey is designed to respect that framework which seeks to classify individuals into 3 mutually exclusive categories i.e employed, unemployed and not economically active. The methods used are well documented and are in the public domain. The data collected are also in the public domain so that any researcher can reproduce what Statistics South Africa reports. However, the methodology used by Adcorp and their source of information is only known to them.
Finally Adcorp accuses Stats SA of being political and I quote "The political heat directed against "labour brokers", who specialise in part-time and fixed-term employment, has found its way into the Stats SA agenda. Despite the Statistician General's repeated assurances that Stats SA is apolitical, close scrutiny reveals otherwise."
This is where we question Adcorp's motive. We do not see a link between not covering Zimbabweans and illegal activities with the politics of labour brokers.
In light of the above, the Statistician General responded on 16 January 2011 in the Business Day to the allegations made by Adcorp by citing the Statistics Act and the fundamental principles of official Statistics which guide the work of Statistics South Africa, like any other reputable statistical office. The Statistics Act, Act 6 of 1999 prescribes that the Statistician-General has no other interest in statistics except the quality of their production, the transparency of their delivery and their public access.
Issued by Parliament, March 9 2011
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