Unemployment is increasingly becoming an economic,
social and political problem in many countries across the globe. In the
context of Tanzania, unemployment – especially among the youth – is
seen as a time bomb that should be handled with very great care.
Among the recent manifestation of the unemployment
problem in Tanzania, include two separate events, where 16,740 people
were struggling to fill just 117 vacancies. This situation is a typical
example of a nation of job seekers as opposed to a nation of job
creators.
Mass job applications
Reports have it that in the second half of 2014,
about 10,000 job seekers were seeking to fill just 70 vacancies in the
Immigration Department of Tanzania.
Similar to this case is that of about 6,740 labour
market entrants, who were eyeing just 47 vacancies. This was the July
2014 case at the Tanzania Bureau of Standards, which is an agency under
the ministry of Industry and Trade.
The figures tell a lot in various contexts.
Economists in general and labour scholars of economics and practitioners
in particular will see it as a situation, where the labour market
supply side has much more to offer than the absorption capacity of the
demand side of the market.
Given the labour market situation in the country,
it is quite possible that there were many more than the 16,740
applicants, who were eyeing 117 jobs. There should have been those, who
did not see the job adverts, those who saw, but were either not willing
or able to apply as well as those who applied, but could not make it to
the list of interviewees.
Problematising the numbers
In the interest of showing how big the job-seeking
problem is, the 16,740 supply side number is hereby analysed and
problematised in the context of the 117 demand side figure. The aim is
to make economic sense out of these figures and see what lies behind
them. In an aggregate form, the figures tell us that the labour demand
was just 0.7 per cent of the supply. The supply was 143.1 times much
more than the demand.
The surplus labour supply was 16,623. One of the
economic interpretation of these figures is the fact that the labour
market is overburdened by its entrants. In order to obey the laws of
free interplay market forces of supply and demand in this situation,
profit-seeking entities are likely to offer low wages and salaries,
inter alia.
If uncontrolled, they may even abuse their market
power and offer substandard working environment in the broader context
of decent jobs. All these are grounded on the economics of market
structure in general and the labour market monopoly by employers in
particular.
Labour supply
The challenge of 16,740 people seeking to fill
just 117 vacancies should be understood from the labour market supply
side. There is anything between 800,000 and one million new labour
market entrants in Tanzania annually. These are those that ‘graduate’
and exit from various learning and education institutions at various
levels.
Since major and far-reaching reforms in the
management of Tanzania’s economy in the mid-1980s, one has seen
increased supply of education institutions at all levels. These are the
‘factories’ that produce the colossal amounts of new labour market
entrants annually. An increase in the labour market entrants has
arguably been over and above the demand for the same.
Labour demand
Labour demand is a derived demand. Captains and
titans of the industry do demand for labour if there is demand for goods
and services to be produced by the labour market. Without demand or
with low or declining demand for both consumer and producer of goods,
corporate chiefs have no economic and business case to demand more
labour. For Tanzania’s economy to increase its demand for labour, a
number of things have to happen. The economy has to grow faster and be
more sustainable, the consumption of domestically produced goods and
services has to increase and the environment for all these to happen has
to be in place.
Towards job creation
The challenging situation, where labour supply is
many times the demand for the same needs to be fixed sooner than later.
Apart from fixing what is broken in the labour demand side of the labour
market equation, job creation is the current thinking and
unconventional thinking globally and at home.
This needs to happen in the context of
entrepreneurship and self-employment. For this to happen, there is a
need to have what it takes for entrepreneurship and self-employment to
be a reality. Among other things, proper entrepreneurial training,
mentoring, coaching and access to capital have to be in place
0 comments:
Post a Comment