Cape Town’s Unemployment Crisis

GOOD Statement by Suzette Little, GOOD Deputy Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Councillor:

According to Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey (Q2, 2025), the Western Cape recorded an unemployment rate of 21.1%, compared to the national average of 33.2%. On paper, this appears commendable, the province has consistently reported lower unemployment than the rest of South Africa over the past decade.

But the lived reality tells a very different story.

In a 1 September 2025 Urban Waste Management Portfolio Committee meeting, the City of Cape Town’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) report revealed a staggering figure: 900,000 people are registered on the City’s jobseekers database, all hoping to secure one of just 30,000 temporary EPWP jobs.

To put this in perspective: Stats SA estimates the Western Cape’s working-age population to be around 5.1 million. At a 21.1% unemployment rate, that translates to approximately 1 million unemployed people province-wide. Yet Cape Town alone records 900,000 jobseekers on its system, leaving almost no space for the rest of the province, a statistical absurdity that simply doesn’t hold up.

The City and DA defenders may argue that the database includes duplicates or is hard to update. But even if some level of duplication exists, it cannot account for hundreds of thousands of excess entries. The City itself admits it struggles to contact jobseekers when work becomes available – an admission that underscores the scale of the crisis. And crucially, not all unemployed individuals are even registered: informal workers, discouraged jobseekers, and people in under-serviced areas are often excluded entirely.

The 900,000 figure is not an overestimate… it’s an undercount.

Rather than confront this reality, the DA leans on provincial averages to paper over the crisis, spinning the narrative that Cape Town is “the best place to find a job.” That narrative collapses when nearly a million residents are officially competing for just 30,000 jobs.

The DA’s story is a dangerous one, a polished fiction that insults the real struggles of the unemployed. Behind the stats are families barely surviving, young people with no hope of work, and communities abandoned by those in power.

Let’s call this what it is: not a success story, but a staggering failure of leadership.

GOOD Manifesto on Economic Growth: Policies aimed at stimulating economic growth and job creation.

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