Inside Parliament - Labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana sounded upbeat about rising productivity last week when he launched the productivity month programme of the National Productivity Institute (NPI), but it is a pity he could not have been equally upbeat about employment trends.
The problem, of course, is that productivity improvements have largely been brought about by increased capital intensity in many industries.
This has been a function of many things. Globalisation and the drive to increase exports, for example, make it vital that industry meets international quality and safety standards, which means using the latest machinery minded by a few well-trained people rather than lots of low-skilled or unskilled labour.
The latter category, which still makes up the bulk of job seekers, has to be accommodated in public works programmes, which are still gathering steam, or in learnerships under the sector education and training authority programmes, many of which have had a wobbly start. Much more will have to be done to mop up these people.
But even youngsters who have had a "good" education sometimes find it hard to get a job, mainly because they have concentrated on "soft" subjects in the arts and humanities rather than appropriate technical or scientific skills, which are in short supply.
Mdladlana heard more on this after the NPI function, when he joined President Thabo Mbeki to speak to a group of youngsters, whose major plea was that more firms should provide the youth with learnerships to advance their skills.
Clearly, this is a major challenge for both the government and the private sector for a whole host of socioeconomic, never mind political, reasons, especially in a pre-election year.
Mbeki was reportedly less than impressed with the group, which was supposed to be his new youth working group modelled on similar groups of business and labour representatives, which act as sounding boards for government policy.
This was because the youth group was mainly made up of urban males and hardly mirrored the gender and regional mix that parliament, for example, insists on as a matter of course when meeting so-called representatives.
Let's hope the group gets its act together next time because this is an important constituency the government should be listening to.
Former politician and now analyst Frederick van Zyl Slabbert last week highlighted another important constituency that needs to be heard more often - the poor. He told the Cape Town Press Club that the growing gap between rich and poor was potentially the greatest threat to South Africa's economic and political goals.
This view reflects the ongoing debate about whether empowerment should benefit the elite few black people at the top of the social and political pecking order, or a wider spectrum of people.
Strong views have been expressed on both sides of the divide and MPs out in their constituencies at the moment trying to ensure that everyone is registered for next year's election can expect to hear a whole lot more about this. They will be able to point to the recent passing of the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Bill as living proof that the government is aware of the problem - and hope to hell that it starts delivering some tangible results by election time, tentatively scheduled for April.
Back to the NPI's productivity month. It said in a statement that the challenge facing the country was the need to improve the economy's labour absorptive capacity, or ability to create more jobs, something it believed better productivity would be able to contribute to in the long term. This was because productivity should be seen as a wealth-generating process that not only drove growth but also contributed to nation building.
On the one hand, the NPI explained, building productive capacity was about creating the appropriate environment, systems and processes to empower people to harness the resources at their disposal. But on the other hand, it also instilled in the workforce the notion that "each and every one of us has a role to play in working productively, and that u
ltimately we all will benefit from it. Individually. Communally. Nationally," the NPI said.
Yvonne Dladla, the NPI's executive director, went further. She said there was "a definite flow of relationships between an individual's energy, effort and ability. However, these feed into an organisation, and it is the responsibility of the organisation to manage, combine and convert all these contributing factors into something valuable, in other words productivity."
This implied not wasting resources such as water and electricity, using them to the best effect and making workers feel part of the production process through innovative incentive schemes such as employee share ownership schemes. We can expect to hear much more about this as the month goes on.