Rebutting GG Alcock’s claims about employment

Yesterday on the Money Show on Cape Talk, GG Alcock claimed that StatsSA misreports our employment figures, by failing to account for forms of employment in the informal economy. Additionally, he said that just as we have an expanded definition for unemployment, which excludes those not actively seeking work, we should have an expanded definition of employment, that includes micro-business owners, hawkers, gig economy workers, and all those working odd jobs we might include under the informal umbrella.

On these counts GG is flat out wrong. Anyone who has actually read the Quarterly Labour Force Survey used to measure employment and unemployment would know this. The QLFS does not simply ask, “Are you employed?”, it uses a structured, indirect approach to classify people according to International Labour Organisation (ILO) definitions of employment, unemployment, and inactivity. Below is a screenshot of the QLFS used for the period January-March 2025.

Respondents are asked if they did any work for pay, profit, or family gain, even if it was just for one hour in the reference week. This includes formal jobs, casual labour, and self-employment. Importantly, it also includes small scale activities that generate goods or income (e.g., collecting firewood, guarding cars, making goods to sell, repairing things, hairdressing).

The statisticians and economists over at StatsSA are aware of the challenges that come with producing robust estimates from samples. So, they designed an indirect method of measuring employment and unemployment that avoids underestimating employment primarily by avoiding reliance on self-identification (asking respondents to simply tick a box “I’m unemployed”). In doing so they capture informal activities and identify labour market participants more reliably than any other methodology of which I am aware.

Many of the paradigmatic kinds of work that GG claims form part of a vast, unseen informal economy are directly addressed in the QLFS. If you are doing any of the activities that GG claims counts as a kind of informal employment not captured by the QLFS, and you answer the survey honestly, you are, contrary to his claims, actually counted among the employed.

I find it strange that few reliably push back against the veracity of GG’s claims about employment underestimates when he is clearly wrong and it takes only a modicum of curiosity about how employment and unemployment are estimated to point this out. It seems that he has either based his panglossian schtick on alarming ignorance, if he had never bothered to look at the QLFS, or dishonesty, if he has in fact seen a QLFS but persists with his bogus and misleading claims about the informal economy.