Tag: unemployment

High youth unemployment – Dr Fred M’membe

High youth unemployment – Dr Fred M’membe Featured

Today, there are 3,491404 (male 1,744,843/female 1,746,561) aged between 15 -24, accounting for 20.03 per cent of Zambia’s population.

The active engagement of youth in sustainable development efforts is central to achieving a sustainable, inclusive and stable nation, and to averting the worst threats and challenges to sustainable development, including the impacts of climate change, unemployment, poverty, gender inequality, conflict, and migration.

While all other areas of human endeavour are important, if we don’t prioritise education and employment very little will be achieved in improving the conditions of our young people. Education and employment are fundamental to overall youth development.

Unacceptably high numbers of young Zambians are experiencing poor education and employment outcomes. In education, many youth of upper secondary age are out of school, and upper secondary enrolment rates are low. Moreover, many of the poorest 12- to 14-year olds have never attended school, and many of the youth of the future are still unable to obtain an acceptable primary education.

In most of our rural areas, young women face particular challenges in terms of securing and completing an education.Youth employment has worsened in recent years.

Unemployment among youth ages 15-24 stands at 24 per cent (male: 23.6 per cent/female: 24.4 per cent). Many of our young people are in precarious or informal work. And most of them are living in poverty even though they are employed.

The challenges of securing and retaining decent work are even more serious and complex for vulnerable and marginalised youth including young women, youth with disabilities.
While entrepreneurship offers opportunities for some youth, a diverse and robust employment strategy must include options and opportunities for all our young people.

We need to start building successful programmes that address the individual and socioeconomic contexts in which our young people actually live, rather than simply repeating the skills-for-employability rhetoric which supposes that there are formal sector jobs available if only young people were not so unprepared.

Equally, such programmes view entrepreneurship practically, as a part of livelihood strategy, rather than through an ideological lens. They believe young people can succeed in business but need support and face risks.

It is important to recognise that the human rights and flourishing of youth are about more than successful transitions to employment. Young people have aspirations that are far broader and that need to be valued and supported. Approaches that focus on prioritising youth participation, respecting youth rights, and addressing youth aspirations are key.

Rather than focusing on narrow measures of educational or employment attainment, it is crucial that suffient attention is paid to young people’s own accounts of what they value for their human development and for the sustainable development of their communities.

Statement of the Socialist Party on Labour Day – May 1, 2020

Statement of the Socialist Party on Labour Day – May 1, 2020

Our country is currently going through unprecedented times, jobs are being lost, working conditions are deteriorating, job insecurity is high, poverty is rapidly increasing. And today, on Labour Day, May Day, our people are reminded that they are steering through not only the Covid-19 pandemic but also the jobs crisis with inept, greedy and dishonest leadership.

Let’s not forget that Labour Day started when Chicago police massacred workers and revolutionaries who were fighting for an eight-hour workday. Back then, workers drudged through ten, twelve-hour shifts.

Today many workers in this country face the same long hours at dangerous work and still barely make enough money to get by.

But for some of us, instead of working too much, we can’t find work at all.

This has to change. Change must come. We have to struggle for a better order, a better society. And all need to participate, play a role.

A strong labour movement is needed and remains crucial to us. Union membership is falling, and organised labour is becoming marginalised. Workers’ concerns are not addressed, and they feel bewildered, leaderless and helpless. Not surprisingly, they turn to crooked politicians that pander to their fears and insecurity, but offer no realistic solutions or inspiring leadership to improve their lives.

Clearly, an apolitical approach to trade union issues can’t do. Organised labour must be part of the mass movement for the struggle for a more just, more fair, more humane and peaceful Zambia.

It gets dark sometimes but the morning comes. Let’s not lose hope; a better Zambia is possible if we struggle for it. And it’s our duty to struggle for it.

Let all the workers of this country join the struggle for a socialist Zambia.

Issued by Fred M’membe on behalf of the Politburo of Socialist Party

Garden Compound, Lusaka

Unemployment undermines human dignity

Unemployment undermines human dignity

Joblessness in Zambia is an extremely serious problem.

One of the main reasons for our very high rates of poverty – 82.2 per cent in Western Province, Luapula Province 81.1 per cent, Northern Province 79.7 per cent, Eastern Province 70 per cent, Muchinga Province 69.3 per cent, North Western Province 66.4 per cent, Southern Province 57.6 per cent, Central Province 56.2 per cent, Copperbelt Province 30.8 per cent and Lusaka Province 29.2 per cent – is the failure of the economy to provide sufficient jobs.

In order to derive a benefit from an economy, people must be able to participate in it; and for most people, the primary means of economic participation is through work.

Unemployment undermines human dignity. It is a terrible frustration and humiliation for a parent to be unable, due to unemployment, provide for the family.

It is equally demoralising for young people to find there’s no work waiting for them when they leave school, college or university.

There is an old joke that the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.

Things are not easy for the great majority of our people, especially the workers and the peasants. But we cannot abandon our moral responsibilities, even when it is difficult to fulfil them.

Much more needs to be said and to be done if we are to meet effectively the massive problems of human suffering in Zambia today. We all know our people’s suffering. But there seems to be very little action taking place in responding to the suffering of our people.

Unemployment is not an inevitable and necessary part of human life. Unemployment is ultimately a product of human decisions and can be eradicated by human decisions.

When we speak of the economy or an economic system, we are speaking of policies and plans which control the wealth and resources of a country, about how resources are distributed between people, and about how the means of production – such as land, factories and technology – are owned and controlled.

At the heart of every economic system lies human needs, human abilities and human decisions, and it is the choices which we make in addressing those needs, sharing those abilities, and making those decisions, that determine justice or injustice of economic system. The more powerful our economic position, the greater our freedom of choice, with the working class, the peasants and the poor in general having very little effective choice in their economic decision making. There is thus a moral quality about an economy, a quality which has its roots in the morally correct or incorrect choices by people. And it is the moral quality of the economy that enables us to make judgments about whether or not it is a just economy.

Karl Marx believed that capitalism needed unemployment: the very workings of capitalist production for profit created unemployment, even in the best of economic times.

Marx argued that capitalists are always in competition with one another to create larger profits – by lowering their costs, largely by increasing labour productivity. A key way to do this is to replace variable capital – living labour – with fixed capital, machines.

And because the purpose of capitalist production is to maximise profit, whenever new technology is introduced it usually means a reduction in jobs – the capitalist can make as much, or more, than before, with fewer workers.

“It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same,” Marx wrote.

As productivity increases, capitalists can use fewer workers to produce more, with surplus workers being retrenched.

However, Marx argued, capitalist production is not just a one-way street. While new technology can displace workers from one industry, new industries are continually being developed. Workers are continually being re-employed and then set free. Although it may rise or fall, unemployment itself is a permanent feature of capitalism.

The unemployed are more than just a permanent reserve army of labour on which capital may call, however. They also serve capital by placing a permanent pressure on the wages of those who are employed, encouraging them to work harder for less, at pain of losing their job to someone else.

“Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle,” wrote Marx.

Capitalism has unleashed the massive productive potential of humanity. It has socialised production, unlocking the possibility of a better world — one based on the power of society-wide organisation and cooperation. Such immense productive power — if placed under the control of workers — could solve the world’s crises. Hunger and unemployment could all be things of the past, but not while production remains geared to profit alone and not to satisfy needs.

Marx believed that working people had both the right and the ability to run society better. In order to do so, however, first they had to take political power from the capitalists and use it to reorganise production in a socially useful way.

We are having such very large numbers of unemployed people became capitalism both creates and needs unemployment.

Capitalists’ investments can be divided into two parts: the part that hires workers, and the part that buys or rents the means of production – machines, raw materials, factories. As capitalism grows, two processes reduce the part of capital that hires workers. Competition leads to concentration: the big fish eat the little fish, or two medium or large companies merge to become a bigger fish. The merged company enjoys greater economies of scale, which basically means that one worker can operate a larger amount of the company’s capital. And whenever there is a merger of two firms, one guaranteed result is retrenchments.

The other process is the capitalists’ drive to increase productivity, which is imposed by competition. Greater productivity means producing a larger number of products from a smaller investment. One way to do this is to drive down wages and drive up working hours. The other way of increasing productivity is to provide workers with more efficient machines or tools. But if workers switch to using more efficient machines, then of course fewer workers are required to produce any given number of products. In a capitalist system, labour-saving technology necessarily destroys the jobs of some workers. This doesn’t mean that the number of jobs falls continuously. Particular industries can find new markets and expand; new industries can be created that need workers; the demand for labour rises and falls with changes in the business cycle. But it does mean that capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to drive workers out of production.

And that is precisely the condition that capitalism needs. Capitalists need a pool of workers who can be drafted into and thrown out of production according to the capitalists’ changing requirements. When the economy is improving, they need workers immediately: hire some of the unemployed. When business turns down, save money ­– retrench them. You can always get more when things pick up.

Whatever the situation of the economy, the pool of unemployed helps keep workers’ wages and other demands down.

Capitalist economists talk about the supply and demand of labour. Marx pointed out: “The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. [The industrial reserve army] is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines … this law within the limits absolutely convenient to … exploitation and to the domination of capital.”