Nearly 20% of local companies reported job cuts during the first nine months of 2022 despite reporting growth in profit post-COVID-19 restrictions, according to the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI).
When the pandemic broke out in 2019, most nations had to reevaluate their goals for economic growth as they struggled to slow the virus’s spread and deal with overburdened healthcare systems.
According to the CZI, most companies reported growth in profit post-COVID-19. The CZI’s third-quarter report shows:
Although job creation is positive, unfortunately, there were also some firms that retrenched workers. This also includes those that created new jobs; about 8% of the firms that created jobs also retrenched, and these are mainly in the wholesale sector, which could reflect casual workers on short contracts.
On the overall, about 17% of the firms indicated that they had retrenched employees during the period under review. The agriculture sector is also among those sectors with a ratio of firms indicating that they had retrenched exceeding the national average. In terms of the actual level, on average, firms that retrenched parted company with about 16% of their total employees over the nine months to September 2022.
The distribution of the retrenchment patterns with respect to age shows that among those that retrenched, firms that are still relatively new (10 years and below) had a higher ratio of workers leaving compared to those fairly older in business.
The report also shows that almost 41% of the businesses indicated that the profitability of their businesses had improved during the first nine months of 2022.
However, about 28 per cent of the businesses indicated that their profitability had dropped, with close to a third of the businesses believing there were not many changes in profitability.