The government holds the responsibility for creating jobs and which also carries the responsibility to create the enabling environment for the Private sector to make its contribution. This is according to the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC).
In a statement on Thursday, the GTUC said “the disproportionate focus and reliance on the private sector to carry the economy will not bring results to the demand for employment creation. The private sector by nature is profit driven, and though from this sector’s perspective nothing is wrong with this principle, government has to understand the sector’s role is not to create jobs.”
On a recording of ‘The Public Interest’ recently, President David Granger stated that “Employment is not something to be provided by the government…There is no magic wand. The government cannot provide jobs in the government service, in the police force or the defence force.”
However, he agreed that the government should partake in creating an enabling environment.
The GTUC said the primary objective of government is the targeting of development that is people-centred and ensure that decisions redound to the people’s benefits.
“Where government fails to put systems in place to stimulate investment, generate employment and economic activities such as infrastructures and other national projects that require its piloting, along with disinterest in the cooperative sector, the economy will splutter,however” the Union body said.
It calls on the government to put a comprehensive Job Creation Plan in place.
It alluded to technical and vocational programmes that are being created to ensure the young people are skhowever, the GTUC noted that “thousands are graduating secondary schools and university with CXCs, diplomas and degrees and cannot find gainful employment and economic opportunities.”
The body said government need to target the “89 percent of our tertiary graduates (who) are leaving” since this is “not an ill for the private sector to fix.”
The President had stated that he fully supports self-employment and the government is “working with the villages to generate more employment in those villages but it is going to be agro-based employment.”
The GTUC said cognisant that some in the government feel that self-employment would be the driving force, the State still has a responsibility to make sure that the legal, social and economic frameworks are in place.
“GTUC has put its position to the Government as to ways and means of helping to develop the village economy and to date there has been no substantive engagement on this issue,” the statement said.
