Mark Barnes has quite rightly looked at the Chinese way of tackling unemployment (Taking jobs to the people like the Chinese are doing solves employment conundrum, April 10). We in SA are facing what appears to be an insurmountable unemployment problem. Already we have almost 55% youth unemployment, and this figure is set to grow unless we very quickly move away from our current way of thinking. The Chinese decided to build factories where the people were (avoiding enormous expenses with regard to travelling and enormous loss of travelling time). We still suffer badly from the old apartheid spatial planning, where our workforce sometimes has to spend over half their wages on travel. Our government could very quickly give incentives to developers who would in turn build factories and manufacturing plants close to the people. Our labour legislation still views the concept of employment as a nine-to-five job from the age of 17 to 65 with one employer. The world has moved on. The intern...
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