The Sunday Times Economic Analysis

The Sunday Times Economic Analysis By the Economist

Employment, employability and productive employment
By the Economist
The promise of the private sector to employ 50,000 in the next few months is indeed sweet music to the ears of the government.

It is perhaps a token of recognition by the private sector of their pursuance of corporate social responsibility. It may be good propaganda for the government. Who can fault any of these?

The issue of generating such employment raises a number of questions. Is it that the private sector had employment opportunities it did not fill till the government persuaded it to do so? Is it that the private sector created these employment opportunities merely to please the government, though there was no need of such employees?

Are they selecting the new recruits on the basis of their capabilities and usefulness or employing anybody, whether useful or not? How come there would be a uniform recruitment of two to each enterprise? Does this not imply that some enterprises would find the additional employment a burden? Would the new recruits be chosen on a basis of merit or will politicians send names as they do to public sector organisations?

These questions would of course remain largely unanswered. Whether the current effort to increase employment of educated youth would be a success would only be revealed in the fullness of time. Earlier efforts such as those during the Premadasa Presidency, it is recognised, were a failure. We certainly hope that this time firms would ensure a more successful deployment of the young unemployed, using the lessons of the previous experience.

The successful implementation of the programme requires an understanding of the complex issues surrounding the problem of unemployment. Unemployment of educated youth has many dimensions besides the economic issue of wages and incomes. It is enmeshed in a complex cultural, educational and sociological mesh that is not easy to disentangle.

The most significant of these is in relation to the employability of the youth. This issue itself has several dimensions. Do the youth have employable skills particularly for private sector employment?

The fluency in English, the language of the business community is vital and confidence in mixing with colleagues is also important. These educated youth are yearning for high status jobs and often find it difficult to reconcile themselves to the fact that their education has not equipped them for the kind of jobs they seek.

To make these youth employable and productive it would be most fitting to have a programme of training for the recruits. Such a programme could improve their language skills, computer literacy, build up their confidence and inculcate the proper values towards their employment and more generally towards society. If this were done, then there is a greater chance that the employment of these youth would be productive to the firm, satisfying to the youth themselves and sustainable.

The large number of dropouts in the last experiment of this sort must be avoided. A key issue in employment generation is the need for it to be in productive employment. The employment of educated youth in order to please a government would be harmful to the private sector, whose survival, especially in the export sector, is dependent on improvements in productivity. Non-productive employment would ultimately do more harm than good to the economy itself.

Therefore the employment policies of the private sector should never deviate from the principles of productive employment generation and improvements in productivity. The lasting solution to the problem of unemployment of educated youth must address the issues of ensuring that the education system produces employable youth; that they have the correct attitudes towards work; that they have the basic skills for training in specific jobs; and are prepared to begin their careers at the bottom and rise up through their proven performance.

Even these may be inadequate if the economy fails to grow and provide adequate employment opportunities. The problem of educated unemployed can only be resolved through a multifaceted strategy of faster economic growth, reform in school and tertiary education, career guidance to youth and attitudinal changes in society. The employment of 50.000 youth by the private sector hardly touches these core issues.

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