AMMAN — The government, through the
National Employment Program, seeks
to encourage the private sector to provide more job opportunities to combat
unemployment, a major challenge facing the national economy, especially after
the pandemic's fallout, according to the Jordan News Agency, Petra.
اضافة اعلان
Prime Minister
Bisher Khasawneh Sunday
announced the employment strategies adopted by the government during a press
conference, saying that the government has allocated JD80 million in the 2022
budget to implement the program, which aims to employ 60,000 Jordanians this
year, at JD150 per month, for six months, as per the annual employment
contracts signed with the private sector.
According to the program, the
unemployment rate stood at 23.2 percent during the third quarter of 2021, a 1.6
percent drop over the second quarter of the same year and a 0.7 percent drop
over with the third quarter of 2020.
Khasawneh had formed a team to work
on the program; it was headed by the minister of labor, the secretaries general
of the ministries of industry, planning, labor, agriculture and finance, and
members of the Social Security Corporation and the Business Development Center.
The program identified other
challenges in the labor market, such as the need for a comprehensive data
system and the increasing number of unemployed people, which stands at 400,000
at a time when 350,000 authorized non-Jordanian workers are in the Kingdom,
along with the rise of unauthorized non-Jordanian workers.
The National Employment Program
established a public national employment workframe to face challenges through
combining efforts and building partnerships with the National Employment
Council. The workframe also envisages enhancing the work environment in the
private sector and regulating the recruitment of non-Jordanian workers.
The program will be implemented to
enhance training management, employing and determining the labor market needs.
The National Employment Council and
sectorial skills councils will also be activated within the program.
The targeted age group, 18 to 40
year olds, will see equal percentages of males and females.
Meanwhile,
Al-Mamlaka TV quoted Minister of Finance Mohamad Al-Ississ, who was speaking at
the Jordan Strategy Forum, a leading think tank on economic development in Jordan, as saying that the economic growth rates of
the country are “incapable of providing sufficient employment”; it called for
the empowerment of the private sector, to enable it to increase employment
rates, and for focusing on the industrial sector, which has the potential to
reduce unemployment rates.
The forum
noted that economic growth should not be the sole objective of governments, which
should work to secure higher levels of employment and thus lower unemployment
rates, an objective no less important than economic growth.
The high
unemployment rate among youth 15 to 24 years is very frustrating, said the
forum, adding that after a long time in school and university, and having high
expectations for the future, young people find themselves facing considerable
uncertainty when the time comes to enter the labor market.
Labor
participation in Jordan is very low, compared to several other countries; total
economic participation stood at around 33 percent in the second quarter of
2021, and female economic participation only at 13.9 percent, making it the
lowest among most other countries, said the forum.
A policy
paper issued by the forum on unemployment, titled “The unemployment challenge
in Jordan: Between supply and demand”, analyzes the factors it sees responsible
for the high unemployment rates in the Kingdom.
The paper
highlights the distribution of
Jordanian workers by economic activity and
employment growth ratios within these activities, and makes several more
recommendations aimed at reducing unemployment among Jordanians.
The paper
also shows that unemployment is a chronic challenge to the Jordanian economy, a
challenge that has increased excessively as a result of the
COVID-19 pandemic;
the overall unemployment rate increased from 19.1 percent in the third quarter
of 2019 to 23.9 percent in the third quarter of 2020, and decreased slightly, to
23.2 percent, in the third quarter of 2021.
These high
rates exact a high economic, social and psychological cost on Jordanians,
making it imperative on both government and private sector to come up with
practical and effective solutions to reduce unemployment.
The forum
paper shows that the number of migrant workers rose from 289,724 in 2006 to
348,736 by the end of 2019, which translates into 181.5 percent unemployed
Jordanians, and that most migrant workers have a level of education that is
lower than that of a secondary education certificate, so at least a certain
number must be replaced with Jordanian workers, a step that would help reduce
the overall unemployment rate.
The forum
also recommended that minimum wage and a decent working environment should be secured
for both Jordanians and guest workers so that that opportunity for exploitation
of migrant workers is limited.
Read more National news
.jpg)
.jpg)
