The common characteristics of employment status during the Covid-19 Lockdown

Abstract

The National Development Plan (NDP) of South Africa identifies the main ills that must be dealt with by 2030. These are poverty and inequality. The NDP also clearly points out the need to deal with unemployment. These build into the sustainable development goals with 2030 as the target year for achievement. Both the NDP for South Africa and the SDGs at the global level had these targets set way before the 2019 coronavirus hit. Now given the disruption that this pandemic caused, the trends and possibility of achieving these goes must be investigated. This paper looks at employment focusing on the characteristics of the people that had a job to return to after the hard lockdown in South Africa.  The main objective is to identify the significant predictors of employment status at the household level. The paper uses data from Statistics in South Africa that were collected in 2021 during the midst of the pandemic. Variables such as age, province, race or population group and gender were included in the analysis. The results of the logistic regression show that age, race, age of the province, and household size are all significant predictors of whether the head of the household was in salaried employment during the Covid-19 pandemic. The fact that females were more likely to be in employment is painting a unique picture of the labour force than what is normally observed in the surveys.