Abstract:
A detailed description of occupational change in South Africa has been missing from the discussion of polarization of labour markets. We show how the occupations data in the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS) can be labelled with the South African Standard Classification of Occupations (SASCO) and cleaned. In our analysis, we describe the apparent trends in the proportional distribution of employment by occupation, and occupational earnings, investigating whether these trends indicate polarization in the South African labour market over the period 2000–2017. We find some evidence for polarization of aggregate earnings by occupation, reflected in a slight shrinkage in the proportion of the middle “third” of the distribution. Polarization has been driven primarily by mean wage changes by occupation rather than employment changes, except for corporate managers, where there has been a significant increase in employment.
