Manpower requirements and existing vacancies: a note on the Central Statistical Office survey

The labour market in Rhodesia may be divided, both on a practical and a legal level, into skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled segments. Employment and training policies will, moreover, be directly influenced by the availability of manpower in each of these segments in relation to the requirements of the economy. The criteria by which surplus or shortage of skills are evaluated are not, however, clear-cut, and it was precisely because of the failure of the April, 1971, conference between Government, employer and employee representatives to reach agreement on the existing manpower supply situation that the Central Statistical Office (C.S.O.) was approached to conduct a survey of existing vacancies.1 The survey was conducted by the C.S.O. but the working party set up after the April conference ultimately sanctioned the form of this survey. It is the intention of the author of this note to evaluate the validity of the conclusions reached in the final C.S.O. report, and to reflect upon some of their implications for employment and training policy