Jobless youth still waiting for better times

BANGKOK, Aug 12, 2010 (IPS) – Tanya Athikom’s search for a permanent job in the information technology sector has so far resulted in a string of disappointments. The Bangkok resident has thus been forced to accept short-term contracts in local and multinational companies here in the Thai capital.

“They now hire new people on a consultancy basis by using headhunting companies to recruit them,” said Tanya, who has held management positions in software companies over the past 10 years. “Many of those hired on the consultancy basis often don’t get their contracts renewed after the completion of the project they were recruited for.”

Because of the nature of their contracts, consultants do not get the employment benefits that full-time staffers at software companies get, she explained to IPS. “They also don’t get respect from colleagues who are permanent employees.”

The challenge this 38-year-old has been facing since the global financial crisis swept through South-east Asia between 2008-09 is far from an exception. Those younger than her in Thailand and in its neighbouring countries have also been hit with a similar unemployment reality.

“Young people in South-east Asia are 4.6 times more likely to be unemployed than adults,” said Kee Beom Kim, a labour economist at the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Asia-Pacific office in Bangkok. “This is the worst ratio in the world.”

In East Asia, by contrast, young people are 2.6 times more likely to be unemployed than adults, he adds.

“You have a large number of people looking for secure jobs but cannot find them,” Kim said in an interview. “The danger is that they would become jaded and detach themselves from the labour market,” he explained, thus losing their skills and worsening further their employment prospects.

Such concerns are understandable in the wake of a new ILO report that cast a gloomy picture of this spike in youth unemployment. The number of jobless young people around the world has “risen to its highest recorded level” and there are signs the trend will increase until the end of 2010, the Geneva- based ILO revealed in the report released on Thursday.

By the end of 2009, there were 81 million unemployed youth globally as a result of the financial crisis. This, the ILO said, is 7.8 million more than the number of unemployed young people in 2007, before the financial crisis that began in the United States struck.

Close to half of the unemployed youth – some 36.4 million – come from the Asia-Pacific region, which is home to 56 percent, or some 350 million, of the world’s estimated 620 million economically active youth population, according to the ILO.

There were 15.3 million unemployed youth in South Asia, 12.8 million in East Asia and 8.3 million in South-east Asia.

Such high numbers have prompted the ILO to describe these victims of the crisis as a “lost generation.”

It adds that women in South-east Asia will account for greater numbers among such a generation, because by the end of 2009 the female unemployment rate stood at 15.7 percent, compared to 14 percent for men.

This disparity stems from the slashing of jobs in the manufacturing sector across the region, where women, such as those in Cambodia, make up the dominant workforce in garment factories that export to the United States and Europe.

Besides garments, labour-intensive sectors in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand that produce toys, games and footwear for the U.S. and European markets were also hit by the drop in demand stemming from the financial crisis.

In many ways, the dim prospects for secure jobs that young people today face are a repeat of what the previous generation had to endure when the 1997 Asian financial crisis swept through the region. Its impact was such that youth unemployment figures in South-east Asia rose from 5.5 million in 1995 to 10.4 million even five years after the crisis.

Analysts also expect the employment patterns that unfolded after the 1997 Asian crisis – and the time it took for a growth in the job market to occur – to be repeated in the current economic climate.

Thailand, for one, has lived up to the projections made by a U.N. study in January that forecast an upward turn in this region’s economic growth this year. Asia’s economic growth will hit 6.7 percent in 2007, making it “the highest among all regions of the world,” predicted the world body’s ‘World Economic Situation and Prospects 2010’ report.

Thailand’s economy is expected to grow by seven to eight percent this year, “the biggest expansion in four years”, the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce said, according to Thursday’s edition of ‘The Nation’, a local English-language daily. “Higher consumer confidence as well as significant exports and a rebound in tourism will help drive the economy.”

But those like Tanya will have to wait a bit more before this rosy outlook translates into more secure jobs.

“One thing we learnt from the Asian financial crisis was that whereas the economies can rebound quickly, labour markets take a much longer time to rebound,” notes the ILO’s Kim. “There is the danger of that pattern being repeated.” (END)  –Marwaan Macan-Markar