The growing challenge of job creation

Channa Kasturisinghe

JOB CREATION: The remarks made by the head of the world's labour watchdog at the 95th International Labour Conference which is now being held in Geneva is an eye opener for policy makers world wide especially in developing countries such as Sri Lanka.

The Director-General of the International Labour Organisation Juan Somavia while pointing out that the global economy is not delivering enough decent jobs that people need, stressed the need for putting in place policies that replace jobless growth with quality, 'job-rich' growth.

According to him the job creation challenge comes on top of the pressure of a continuing large scale shift out of agriculture and rural areas towards cities.

This is also true in the case of Sri Lanka where the share of employment in the agriculture sector declined to 30 per cent in 2005 from about 35 per cent in the previous year.

The Central Bank annual report said that the reason for the decline was due to a shift of excess labour from agriculture to other sectors with a high demand for employment.

Another burning issue discussed at the conference is the existence of a huge informal sector which excludes workers from basic social security safety nets and leaves them in total insecurity. This is an issue in Sri Lanka too where around 70 percent of the employed are in the informal sector.

The service economy has been considered as a "major growth area for employment" and therefore policy makers should look providing necessary training especially to rural youth in order to attract them into this sector.

The Government has taken commendable steps towards this ends such as the Nena-Sala programme through which 1000 IT centres will be set up in rural areas.

However, such efforts should be followed with creating job opportunities by encouraging more investments in the service sector.

The head of the ILO stressed the importance of such efforts at the conference addressing more than 4,000 delegates representing governments including Sri Lanka.

"The hardware of the new technologies is spreading much faster than the human software of manager and worker skills to make full use of its potential," he said.