Unemployment statistics: Are they accurate?

Friday, 31 May 2013 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Sri Lanka’s premier human resource association for practitioners, the Sri Lanka Institute of Training and Development (SLITAD) staged its 2013 conference on the theme ‘Talent Drought,’ citing the industries of apparel and agriculture and the next sectors to face this challenge being IT, hospitality and financial services.

Multi-disciplinary experienced corporate personality Rohantha Athukorala who is a Board Director on many public and private sector organisations questioned the statistic of Sri Lanka registering an unemployment level of 5.1% given that the country has almost 1.5 million recipients of families who come under the Samurdhi scheme and who can actually fall into the category of being employed as they may be running a micro business entity.

Whilst acknowledging that there is a genuine shortage of labour reported by apparel and tea manufacturers, the speaker felt more work has to be done to unearth the hidden talent of the Samurdhi recipients who in fact can be tapped for formal employment.

In 2013 the allocation for Samurdhi recipients was around Rs. 42 billion, where a family is entitled for a subsidy in the range of Rs. 615 to Rs. 1,500 and monies are deposited in a bank account to encourage savings whilst credit card availability is there to be used exclusively at CWE outlets.

Apparently the revised rate was a 33% increase and it included families from the Districts of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu and divisions of Vavuniya and Jaffna so that it cuts across the country. But the speaker said that this segment of people can be driven to higher productivity and the current labour issue partly addressed.

Organisations like SLITAD must take the lead and unearth this hidden talent given that tourism is targeting attracting 2.5 million visitors from the current one million whilst the tea industry is challenged with a target of 2.5 billion dollars from the current one and half billion and the cinnamon and ICT sector is focusing on a billion dollars in revenue in the next couple of years which cannot materialise unless Sri Lanka has the people, opined Athukorala, who is actively involved in policymaking in both the export industry of Sri Lanka and SME development.

ILO defines unemployment worker as those who currently are not working but are willing and able to work for pay, currently available to work and who actively search for work.