Dear Editor,
As part of the run up to the 2011 election, Stabroek News invited the political parties to submit weekly columns in the Sunday Stabroek. The column written by David Granger on November 27, 2011 caught my eye, especially the comments on ‘The employment crisis.‘ Mr Granger quoted the latest Household Income and Expenditure Survey which disclosed about half of the population is not gainfully employed.
On the other hand, the PPP/C Minister of Labour in September 2011 asserted, with official truth, that only 10.7 per cent of the country’s total workforce is unemployed.
These apparently contradictory figures have been arrived at because it is the convention throughout the world to record as ‘unemployed‘ only those who have officially sought, but have not obtained, employment. However, despite the validity of the official statistics, the sad fact is that, in addition to the 10.7 per cent of our workforce that is officially unemployed, many who would like to work are not actively seeking jobs simply because they have abandoned all hope of ever finding suitable occupations; while others, though nominally employed, are earning incomes and wages that condemn them to ‘livelihoods‘ below the poverty line and who exist outside of the official economy deeming them ‘part-time employed phantoms‘ with few or no fringe benefits.
The recommended methodology to more accurately understand the employment crisis in Guyana is to conduct a comprehensive labour related survey. These kinds of study were anathema to the Jagdeo regime. They did not have the political appetite and strategic intellect to deal with these human development realities, so the easy way out for them was to guess the unemployment figures.
The empirical evidence for my statements can be found from the army of ex-sugar workers, bauxite workers and public servants who have left their official occupation but have not registered themselves as being unemployed. Instead, they occupy themselves as hucksters, as petty traders and as small-time entrepreneurs, barely managing to survive, and as such are non-existent on the PPP unemployment register.
Thus it is fair to conclude that the Jagdeo years were disastrous years for employment creation in Guyana.
But the bigger issue remains the PPP/C’s difficulty in attracting investments of the size of OMAI, DDL and Banks DIH, which could significantly make an impact on the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed.
The Jagdeo regime sold to the nation that investments like the one by Queens Atlantic in Sanata Textiles were deserving of tax holidays because of the number of jobs they would create. We were told by GO-INVEST that the privatization deal with Queens Atlantic was supposed to create 180 bio-technology and textile-related jobs in the medical plaster industry, among others, with cash investments in the economy of $3.4 billion through this venture. Judge for yourself the track record of this deal that benefited from tens of millions of dollars in tax holidays. This is a clear example of PPP/C public policies not being driven by job creation projects but being more focused on agendas that benefited a select few at the expense of the many.
We as a nation must make clear to our government that they must never subject us to poor public policies which are driven by economic forces that reward a few rather than the nation, such as the Queens Atlantic deal or the Fip Motilal deal. Such public policies will always have negative consequences for Guyana, and that is why we are where we are – the second poorest in the Caribbean.
There is much expectation for the new Ramotar administration to act responsibly. At a minimum, this new government should launch a comprehensive labour market survey and use these numbers to effectively plan and create new jobs in the next 5 years.
Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh
