SA Public Sector Workers Earn 50% More Than the Private Sector
Stats SA puts the average monthly salary in SA at R28,220 in the third quarter of 2024, which is 6.6% higher than it was the previous year.
Salaries are basically keeping pace with inflation.
Public sector employees earn an average R41,200 a month, which is nearly 50% more than their peers in the private sector. These salaries, too, are keeping pace with inflation.
National Treasury explains this salary differential as a deliberate effort by government to attract and retain critical skills.
It also means public sector workers are among the top 10% of earners in the country, adding to already skewed income inequality – an interesting paradox for a government sworn to eliminating inequality.
Bear in mind roughly one in five workers in SA are in the public sector. It is easier to shift Table Mountain three feet to the right than trim the public sector.
That said, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has announced a plan for early retirement to start the agonising process of downsizing the public sector’s monstrous claim on the fiscus.
Source: Stats SA
In the African context, we’re miles ahead of countries like Mali, Madagascar, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, where the public sector represents between about 3-6% of the workforce.
Sweden, Norway, Slovakia, Denmark and Hungary come in at a public sector percentage of 29-32% of the workforce. Cuba and Oman are close to 80%.
We’re not anywhere near these figures, but even at about 20% we don’t have the tax base to support a lumbering and increasingly extractive public sector that produces, overall, a shoddy return for the money spent.
Stats SA figures show there was a 294,000 drop in formal employment over the year to September 2024, alongside the loss of 250,000 part-time jobs.
The private sector is being throttled by all sorts of taxes, rules, levies and interventions aimed at poorly defined goals such as “equality” and “sustainability”, which will never be achieved.
We suspect that was the goal all along.
