Companies - News around Africa - September 17, 2020

Kenyan Companies Have Declared More than 14,000 Jobs Redundant since Q1

September 17, 2020

404

A staggering 14,401 formal sector jobs have been declared redundant by Kenyan companies since the end of Q1 2020. The Kenyan Labour Ministry said in a report to parliament that a total of 628 firms have sent out redundancy notices.

“The ministry has continued to receive redundancy notices affecting employees in the formal sector from employers…,” the Cabinet Secretary for for Labour, Social Security and Services, Simon Chelugui, was quoted to have said.

Chelugui went further to state that many other companies are yet to issue redundancy notices, a situation that makes it it difficult to ascertain exactly how many of them have been impacted negatively by the pandemic.

Business Daily reported that the job redundancies point to the fact that not all the layoffs that have occurred in the East African country since March were entirely caused by scrapped job positions. Note that redundant jobs are mainly jobs that are deemed unnecessary. Companies sometimes adopt this strategy in a bid to reduce overhead costs whilst protecting profitability.

Also note that the main difference between redundancies and layoffs is that while the first occur due to jobs that are no longer needed, layoffs are only triggered by the unavailability of jobs for employees whose services are still necessary.

Meanwhile, Kenya has recorded more than a million job losses since the Coronavirus pandemic hit the country hard during the first quarter of the year. Data obtained from the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics has shown that about 1.72 million workers lost their jobs between March and June this year.

Q2 2020 was a difficult period for most Kenyan workers (and indeed workers around across Africa and beyond) due to the countless layoffs and pay cuts that happened within this period due to the Coronavirus pandemic.