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The Congress of South African Trade Unions is absolutely shocked at the revelation in the Stats SA Labour Force Survey that the country's official unemployment rate increased to 24.5% of the labour force in the third quarter of 2009, from 23.6% in the second quarter, and that the number of employed people fell by 484,000 to 12.885 million.
This means that a staggering 4.192 million South Africans are now without work. And that rises to 4.702 million if you add the 510 000 who have given up even looking for a job or have opted out of the labour force completely.
The more realistic expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those people that have given up looking for work, climbed from 32.5% to 34.4% in the same period.
Stats S.A. say that "these patterns ... show the continued deterioration in the South African labour market ... job losses were widespread, affecting most industries". But of particular concern is that the key manufacturing sector shed 150,000 jobs, equivalent to 8% of total jobs for the industry. Wholesale and retail trade lost 110,000 jobs.
These statistics prove that we remain in the midst of a national unemployment emergency. But it is more than that. They reveal a fundamental structural problem in the economy, an economy which is being deindustrialised.
The underlying cause is the mistaken policies between 1996 and 2004, of cutting tariffs and privatising basic services, combined with a failure to restructure the economy, and in particular the totally inappropriate monetary policies pursued in those years, centred on the pursuit of the misguided belief in inflation-targeting.
All our warnings about these false policies were ignored, and now the problems they have caused coincide with a world economic crisis and the chickens are coming home to roost.
This is reflected in the wave of community service-delivery protests, which are about specific local grievances but are also related to the structural problems in the economy.
We have a new government committed to reverse these policies and implement a strategy to grow the economy and create decent work. But when they are still finding their feet they have got caught up in this massive crisis.
It is more urgent than ever that they adopt a bold new approach, speedily address these structural problems and implement the ambitious job-saving and job-creating measures spelled out in the ANC manifesto, the State of the Nation address and the Framework Agreement on South Africa's response to the world economic crisis.
Immediate measures must be taken to protect our industries and prevent an even worse descent into total economic meltdown. Government, business and labour - and the SA Reserve Bank - must focus all their policies on saving jobs, creating new jobs, ending the jobloss bloodbath as rapidly as possible and getting the South African economy moving forward again.