PHOTO | JENNIFER MUIRURI Workers celebrate after President Uhuru
Kenyatta ordered that minimum wage be increased by 14 per cent during
the Labour Day celebrations in Nairobi on May 1, 2013.
NATION MEDIA GROUP
by gaya business times
The
global jobs crisis has hit young people hard. Of the world's estimated 211
million unemployed people in 2009, nearly 40 per cent – or about 81 million –
were between 15 and 24 years of age. In many countries, this grim unemployment
picture is darkened further by the large number of youth engaged in poor
quality and low paid jobs with intermittent and insecure work arrangements,
including in the informal economy. Many youth are poor or underemployed: some
152 million young people, or 28 per cent of all young workers in the world,
work but live in households that earn less than the equivalent of US$1.25 per
day. Youth unemployment and underemployment result in missed opportunities in
terms of economic growth and development.
According to the
Integrated Labour Force Survey (2012/2001), the population of Mainland Tanzania
was 32.8, 17.8 million people constituted the country’s total labourforce out
of whom 15.5 million (87.1 percent) were employed and 2.3 million (12.9
percent) were unemployed. Of the employed 14.6 million (94 percent) were fully
employed while 950 427 (6 percent) were underemployed. Youth are the most
affected group; youth unemployed is 17 percent as compared to 12.9 percent of
the general unemployment rate in Tanzania. In Zanzibar, the youth unemployment
rate is estimated at 20 percent (HBS 2004/2005
The
Global Jobs Pact, adopted by the International Labour Conference in 2009,
highlights the labour market vulnerabilities of young people and calls for
action to support youth at risk. During the jobs crisis, many governments have
taken measures to sustain youth employment through a combination of incentives
for new employment, employment services, skills development, income support,
public works and community services, and youth entrepreneurship. This brief
highlights a number of lessons learned from the implementation of initiatives
during past crises. The latter could be taken into consideration by
governments, in concert with the social partners, to design interventions aimed
at promoting decent work for young people during economic recovery
Employment
outcomes of young people are particularly sensitive to the economic cycle.
Youth are generally the first to lose their jobs in times of economic
contraction and the last to gain employment when the economy rebounds. The
experience from past jobs crises shows that it takes longer for young people to
reap the benefits of economic recovery and employment growth, even more so for
disadvantaged youth. Furthermore, young people who experienced decent work
deficits during the crisis will be competing for jobs with millions of new
labour market entrants in the coming years. Increasing pressure on the labour
market can create social discontent. The section below highlights the policy
During the
crisis, youth unemployment increased at a faster pace than overall
unemployment. Today, youth are between two and three times more likely to be
unemployed than their adult counterparts. The number of unemployed youth
increased by almost 8 million since 2007 and reached a global rate of 13.0 per
cent in 2009, compared to 11.9 per cent two years earlier. During the same
period, the adult unemployment rate increased from 4.2 to 4.9 per cent. Youth
unemployment rates grew in all regions, particularly in developed economies and
Eastern Europe.
The crisis has
discouraged many young people in their job search. The challenge of reducing
the unemployment rate becomes greater for policy-makers who want to reduce the
numbers of discouraged young workers – less attached to the labour market than
the unemployed. In the EU, about 3.9 million inactive youth were willing to
take a job by the end of 2009 – although they had lost hope and
were not active in their job search. This figure adds to that of 5.2 million
unemployed youth
Policy
challenges are also linked to the increasing number of young workers in
intermittent and insecure work arrangements in developed countries and to the
rising share of young working poor and young people working in the informal
economy in developing countries. By the end of 2009, the rate of young workers
in precarious employment in the European Union was four times higher than that
of adult workers (40.8 and 10.3 per cent, respectively).
In Latin
America, the percentage of young workers engaged in the informal economy in
urban areas increased by 5.4 per cent between mid-2007 and mid-2009 to reach
51.3 per cent, while an additional quarter of young workers were employed
informally by enterprises operating in the formal economy (ILO 2009). The
projected increase in the overall number of working poor (ILO 2010) is likely
to affect more young workers, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and the
Pacific, given their over-representation in low-income jobs.
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