Unprecedented unemployment

Al Ghad’s Mohammed Sweidan said that there is no need for thorough studies and statistics to know that the percentage of the unemployed has increased and will rise dramatically and unprecedentedly during this stage due to the difficult conditions imposed by the "coronavirus crisis." He said that the Ministry of Labour, in its recent statements, did not bring out something new.

What is more important than anticipating the increase in unemployment rate is looking for and finding appropriate means to halt this increase, which could reflect negatively on all of us, the writer said.

The government has not identified exact measures to be taken to reduce the high rate, while it talked about the issue in a general way, noting that it is “thinking outside the box” to find solutions, including marketing Jordanian competencies, redesigning the national framework of empowerment and employment, in addition to the replacement of expatriate workers with Jordanians.

These solutions do not reflect out-of-the-box thinking, as they have been previously proposed, adding that applying marketing the Jordanian competencies on the ground amid the coronavirus crisis is very hard, with many countries, especially the Arab Gulf states, which recruit tens of thousands of Jordanian workers, face many problems in this regard and have fired a good number of employees.

Protecting workers and preventing them from losing their jobs should be a top priority for the government, he said, urging the related bodies to review its decisions to avoid any mistake that could aggravate unemployment problem.