LABOUR: Jobless Growth Still Plagues Asian Youth

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 19 2005 (IPS) - Christine Mallion’s tireless search for an ideal job in the Filipino capital continues months after she graduated from Ateneo de Manila University, a private liberal arts establishment.

”Finding my ideal job is extremely difficult. I’m losing hope with getting the right package deal,” the 24-year-old says in an interview. ”I’m looking for full-time work in the area of training in organisational development.”

The fruitless search has pushed Mallion to consider joining the over seven million Filipinos who have left for other countries in search of employment. ”If worse comes to worst, I will work for a call centre despite the night shifts (and) will save up for a year and leave the country to look for work in Australia.”

Mallion’s predicament is not unique in her country. Nor is it across Asia, for the region is burdened by young people who are finding it increasingly difficult to find proper employment despite the continent’s much bandied economic growth figures.

Young women and men between 15 and 24 years bear the ”brunt of rising unemployment,” states the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in a recently released report, ‘Labour and Social Trends in Asia and the Pacific 2005.’

”While young people made up 20.8 percent of Asia’s labour force in 2004, unemployed youth constituted 49.1 percent – almost half – of the region’s total jobless population,” states the report by the Geneva-based U.N. body. ”The youth unemployment rate stood at 7.5 percent in East Asia, 10.8 per cent in South Asia and a staggering 17.1 percent in South-east Asia.”

Although South Asia has the largest number of unemployed youth, some 14.5 million in 2004, it is South-east Asia that exposes the dire realities faced by young job seekers. ”Youth unemployment in this subregion more than doubled, from just five million (nine percent) in 1994 to nearly 10.5 million (17.1 percent) in 2004,” notes the ILO study.

The countries with the heaviest burden are Indonesia and the Philippines, where youth unemployment rates have gone beyond 25 percent, ”the highest rates in Asia.” Other countries with similar worrying signs are Sri Lanka, where 27.2 percent of youth are unemployed, and Pakistan, where 13.4 percent of the youth have no jobs.

And young women are worse off than their male counterparts, particularly in South Asia and South-east Asia. In South Asia, for instance, nearly 16 percent of young women were unemployed in 2004, as opposed to 13 percent young men, according to the ILO report.

”This is largely due to a lack of jobs available in the formal sector,” Gyorgy Sziraczki, senior economist at the ILO’s Asia-Pacific regional office, told IPS. ”The formal sector (where one works the traditional nine-to-five routine) is not absorbing enough people in South-east Asia and South Asia.”

It is a pattern that raises questions about the region’s economic growth rates, since the economies have not created sufficient jobs despite steady growth, he added. ”The youth have been adversely affected by the growth in more capital intensive than labour intensive sectors.”

According to the ILO, there was only a 1.6 percent increase in jobs created in the Asia-Pacific region between 2003 and 2004, while the region registered a strong seven percent economic growth rate during the same period.

In August, the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (AsDB) expressed similar concerns about the disappointing employment trends in the region despite high growth rates. There are nearly half a billion people who are underemployed or unemployed in the Asia-Pacific region out of the total labour force of 1.7 billion people, the AsDB stated.

As a consequence of that, the education system is ”becoming a parking lot,” says Molly Lee, senior programme specialist in higher education at the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). By that she meant the number of students who opt to remain in the school system and continue to take courses because of the lack of suitable jobs.

But such a sizeable number of unemployed youth does not automatically result in social unrest, she told IPS. ”If they realise that unemployment is a common problem among their peers they may accept it as something normal, not one to protest against.”

However, the ILO points out what such a condition could lead to. The failure to ensure decent work for the region’s youth will undermine the economic, social, political and technological development of the affected countries, it states. ”The transition from childhood to adult life and especially from school to work largely determines a person’s chances of escaping poverty and finding decent work.”

And responses by Filipina Mallion will inevitably become an inviting alternative for the unemployed, disaffected youth – being part of the country’s brain drain.