The jobs are there

May 04, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

City Hall, before it imploded in the late 1970s, had around 3,500 workers. It was one of the largest employers in the country, outside of the major state-owned bauxite and sugar industries.
The City Council then ran markets in Stabroek, Bourda, La Penitence and Kitty. It had a large abattoir which was always busy. It employed hundreds of manual labourers. It had its own mechanical workshop, its own incinerator, a well-staffed public health department, hundreds of workers in sanitation and weeding gangs, a large Constabulary and its own garbage collection fleet.
It could not after a while afford to pay all of these workers, and in the end was forced to lay off thousands of them and abandon many of the services it provided.
A great deal of the work which in the past used to be done by City Hall is now done by private contractors, and this has caused many people to lose an appreciation of the thousands of jobs which can be created within the municipality.
This past week, a letter in the media gave a hint of the employment-generating capacity of City Hall. It was pointed out that some five hundred persons were employed during the clean-up exercise in the city.
These persons should be on the fulltime payroll of City Hall. They should not be contract workers, because they are needed to maintain the work that they started. City Hall should be increasing its employment.
While the city should not aim to go back to its bloated days of 3,500 workers, it is capable of having at least 2,000 full time workers, including City Police and the City Constabulary.
The municipalities and neighbourhood democratic councils can end up creating an additional five thousand jobs. This, if combined with the call centres that Donald Ramotar had touted, would solve Guyana’s unemployment problem.
There are more than five thousand persons seeking jobs. But if jobs can be created within the local authorities, it will have spin-off effects and other jobs will be created.
The approach by all governments has been to assume that it is white collar jobs which allow for the creation of blue collar jobs. But that approach has not worked because there has never been significant investment to absorb the large number of persons seeking white collar jobs.
A different approach should be tried. The local authorities should be given the resources to employ thousands of persons throughout Guyana. These jobs will be primarily blue collar in nature and would lead to white collar jobs. The movement therefore has to be from blue to white and not the other way around.
Blue collar workers suffer more from underemployment than unemployment. Many blue collar workers obtain only on average two to three days of work per week. This explains why wages for blue collar work are so high, despite the overall high rate of unemployment in the economy. Blue collar labour is overpriced because of the high incidence of underemployment.
The biggest villains in all of this are the local authorities. There are thousands of building plans which take an inordinately long time to be approved by local authorities. Each day that these plans are not approved, they deny thousands of blue collar workers employment. If local authorities can speed up building approvals, it would generate thousands of more jobs within the economy.
There is no need for Guyanese to be unemployed. The jobs can be found without foreign investments. But it requires placing the municipalities on a sound financial footing and it requires them to move more quickly in expediting building plans in the country.
City Hall cannot have persons protesting for their money after they would have done the work. Place them on the permanent establishment and let them receive a weekly salary.
The sloth in the approval of building plans costs jobs. While the plans are sitting on somebody’s desk, there are workers waiting to be employed on the construction sites. But nobody is doing anything to speed up building approvals and therefore the workers suffer.
Once building plans are approved at a faster rate, the unemployment problem will disappear. Jobs will be created and people will be happy.

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