Aidan J. Horn (2012,O) is an economist and software engineer. He recently published a working paper, under the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) in the School of Economics at UCT. The automation driven by software is reshaping South Africa's job market, particularly impacting mid-skill positions. 

As routine tasks become automated, jobs requiring moderate skills, often in administrative or manufacturing roles, are declining. This leads to a shift where aggregate earnings are increasingly concentrated in high-skill, high-paying jobs that involve software development, data analysis, and specialized technical expertise. 

Simultaneously, the demand for low-skilled jobs in sectors like personal services and retail is sustained, driving wages upwards at the lower end of the skill distribution. This dynamic creates a polarized labor market, with significant wage growth at both the high and low ends, while the middle segment faces contraction and wage stagnation.

Conclusion:

High-skill and low-skill jobs are growing and paying more, but mid-skill jobs are disappearing and wages aren’t improving.

The reference for the paper is

Horn, A.J., Leibbrandt, M. & Donaldson, A. 2025. Occupational Polarization in South Africa: Evidence from the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series. (SALDRU working paper 312). Available: https://www.opensaldru.uct.ac.za/handle/11090/1047

The abstract reads:

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.