Over the past three decades, the South African labour market has undergone significant transformation in its legal framework, demographic makeup and sector dynamics. Before 1994, the dominant sectors of the economy were mining, agriculture and manufacturing. While these sectors are still critical to our economic development and growth, we are a long way from limited options as other sectors began to emerge, such as telecoms, ICT, and a booming tourism sector, among others. This is a story of the developmental state with its progressive, world-class legislative reform, which is still evolving to meet the ever-changing landscape to be responsive to contemporary trends.Over the past 10 years, our economy has gradually been evolving from routine, labour-intensive sectors towards highly digitalised, capital-intensive and service-orientated industries. This shift has altered the skills profile required by employers, creating a double-sided challenge: an urgent need to unlock advanced skills to drive competitive growth, balanced with an unyielding mandate to protect local opportunities and vulnerable workers from exploitation.Digitisation has opened large-scale opportunities in platform work, where traditional office spaces have been replaced by an app. In our address to the 52nd session of the African Regional Labour Administration Centre, which took place this month in Geneva, Switzerland, we highlighted the importance of ensuring technological transformation and digital labour platforms are accompanied by labour protection, social dialogue and inclusive policy responses.As labour markets continue to evolve amid technological changes, public health challenges, economic uncertainty and shifting patterns of work, our programmes and institutional priorities must likewise adapt to meet our emerging needs.We have the important task of ensuring more young South Africans are skilled and absorbed into meaningful job placement opportunities.Defeating the unemployment rate cannot be achieved by government acting in isolation. This requires a modern, agile labour market framework built on robust social compacting, deliberate skills development and smart regulation.To grow a complex, modern economy, our training interventions must directly target the scarce and critical skills required for immediate industrial absorption. Through the department of employment and labour’s budget vote 31 allocation, we are executing labour market interventions designed to bridge the gap between learning and earning.Our focus is squarely on driving measurable pathways into the economy. This financial year, our interventions are structured to deliver targeted technical and professional support, including:Work-integrated earning: for the placement of 20,000 TVET students, engineers, professional technicians, accountants and law students into practical, on-the-job training environments.Mass digital upskilling: training of 10,000 young people in digital capabilities to meet the demands of the platform and gig economies.Essential foundations: providing driving licence training for 10,000 youth to remove a common, practical barrier to entry-level employment.We have explicitly declared 2026 as “the Year of Putting Young South Africans to Work, in Honour of the 1976 Youth and Commemoration of the Youth Uprising Golden Jubilee”.In doing so, we are committing to a recruitment drive targeting 200,000 unemployed individuals into targeted labour market interventions this financial year alone, scaling to 605,000 beneficiaries over the medium-term expenditure framework period. Crucially, 70% of these opportunities are strictly reserved for our youth.Unlocking skills for a growing economy is only half the equation. Those newly developed capabilities must be met with a fair, law-abiding and protective domestic labour market. We cannot allow structural transition or high unemployment to become an excuse for down-managed labour standards or the economic displacement of local workers.The department is strengthening its regulatory frameworks to ensure fair competition. The Employment Services Amendment Bill provides the state with a clear legal mechanism to regulate the employment of foreign nationals, directly addressing instances where sectors distort local hiring practices or leverage undocumented labour to bypass basic conditions of employment.In recent times, our joint blitz enforcement and inspections conducted with the department of home affairs, South African Police Service and other law enforcement agencies have revealed heightened non-compliance in relation to the Immigration Act . Under this act, it is strictly prohibited to hire undocumented foreigners. Employers who do so risk criminal charges or paying heavy fines of up to R100,000 per undocumented worker, as proposed in the bill.Protection, however, relies entirely on the state’s capacity to enforce compliance with the phased deployment of 10,000 young labour inspector assistants. While South Africa successfully built a protective, equitable and modern legal framework for workers after 1994 — leading to a significant increase in the black middle-class — the labour market’s performance remains constrained by sluggish macroeconomic growth and a mismatch between available skills and market demand. Achieving a more inclusive labour market over the coming decades will depend heavily on structural economic reforms, a stronger technical and vocational training ecosystem, and targeted job-creation partnerships.Meth is minister of employment and labour.