In the shadow economy, abroad, or vegetable gardens
“After a long period of crisis the labor market has recently shown some stabilization and gradual growth of public employment,” Ivan Sakhan, Minister of Labor and Social Policies, told the Ukrainian parliament on October 9. In his words, the unemployment level assessable by International Labor Organization (ILO) methods “dropped from 11.9% in 1999 to 11.4% in the first six months of the current year... This year has seen an over twofold reduction (against the same period of last year) in the number of those laid off. The number of part-time workers has decreased by almost 200,000. Many more jobs have been created, while the employment service job bank has expanded almost one-and-half-fold,” he emphasized optimistically.
However, although Mr. Sakhan believes that “the rapid upward tendency in recorded unemployment has been broken,” it remains difficult to claim with confidence that the true number of the jobless has dropped significantly in Ukraine. It is an open secret that, apart from the 2.6 million officially registered unemployed and those seeking a job via employment centers (the minister quoted precisely these statistics in his report), Ukraine also has a third type, underemployment. In an interview with The Day, Ella Libanova, Doctor of Economics, chair of the human development department at the Production Forces Research Council of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, said, “Ukrainian citizens often for one reason or another have to work an incomplete workday, week, etc. In other words, he/she is neither unemployed officially nor fully employed in reality (according to the Ministry of Labor, there are about 787,000 of such semi-employed in this country — Author). For this reason, I estimate that the unemployment rate in Ukraine among the people aged 15 to 70 is about 20%.” Nor should we forget the 1.4 million employed Ukrainian citizens who have been laid off.
Incidentally, answering the questions of people’s deputies, Mr. Sakhan refused pointblank to sum up the figures 787,000 and 1.4 million. “Sometimes those laid off still work an incomplete workday,” he stuck, rather unconvincingly, to his point.
Still, the minister had to admit that “young people and other categories of the population who are seeking a job in the unofficial economy or outside the country also constitute a sizable portion of Ukraine’s hidden unemployment. As The Day was told by Valentyna Hoshovska, chair of the parliamentary Committee for Labor and Social Policies, “The number of people now illegally seeking jobs in Italy, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal is about 120,000, 100,000, 50,000, and 25,000 respectively.”
Mr. Sakhan explained the unwillingness of Ukrainian citizens to work for the benefit of their homeland by saying, “People today demand high standards at a prospective workplace. The are reluctant to apply to outdated facilities with hard working conditions and low pay.”
Ms. Libanova added, “Often people do not turn to job centers because the latter are in no position to offer them something in line with their profession.”
The problem is further complicated by the fact that, as Ms. Hoshovska noted, “the demand for hired labor at enterprises makes up a very small share of the total number of unemployed.. If this trend persists, it will take us ever ten years to eliminate unemployment.”
