South Africa’s other two labour markets don’t absorb nearly enough people, which leaves many South Africans unemployed or out of the labour force entirely. As the National Development Plan recognises, this problem has a lot to do with spatial legacies and access to information about work. As a result, the plan pays special attention to the distances between people and jobs.
It also points out that if we are going to create 11 million new jobs by 2030, many of them cannot be highly paid. This ties in with the product market reform agenda: if the wages in new jobs can’t be that high, we need to achieve downward pressure on prices so that the possible wages command decent buying power.