Why are so many unemployed?

How often have children been told, especially in Eastern cultures, that if they don’t study hard, they will end up as rubbish collectors, road sweepers and gardeners. Until today, many parents hope their children will become doctor, engineers, lawyers, accountants, etc.

Nov 11, 2016

By Anil Netto
How often have children been told, especially in Eastern cultures, that if they don’t study hard, they will end up as rubbish collectors, road sweepers and gardeners. Until today, many parents hope their children will become doctor, engineers, lawyers, accountants, etc.

Maybe because of the tough economic conditions in previous generations, parents felt that education would provide, for their children, a passport to a life of privilege and comfort and ease that they could only dream of. And who could blame them for wanting a ‘better life’ for their children?

Perhaps that is why many parents who can afford it will save and scrimp for their children’s education so that they can obtain a ‘paper qualification’ in the best universities or colleges.
But there is a problem.

Catholic thinker and economist EF Schumacher challenges us by asking: “Is education to be ‘a passport to privilege’ or is it something which people take upon themselves almost like a monastic vow, a sacred obligation to serve the people?”

It makes a big difference, he says. If education is seen as a “passport to privilege,” then the content of the education will not be aimed at serving the people.

Instead, “the privileged minority will wish to be educated in a manner that sets them apart and will inevitably learn and teach the wrong things, that is to say, things that do set them apart...”

They will somehow acquire “a contempt for manual labour, a contempt for primary production, a contempt for rural life.”

Upon graduation they would head for the bright city lights, in trendy districts where the yuppies participate in a “mutual admiration society, a ‘trade union of the privileged’, to see to it that (their) privileges are not eroded by the great masses of his contemporaries who have not been educated.”

Conversely, if education is seen as bestowing on graduates an obligation to serve society, then our approach would be different. Graduates, even post-graduates, would see themselves as servants of the country, Schumacher believed. He cited St Luke: Much will be expected, more will be asked, of the person to whom much has been given. This, he said, is “an elementary matter of justice.”

They would go back to their communities, rural or urban, and put the knowledge and skills they had learned for the benefit of ordinary people. After all, it is these ordinary people who, through their work, paid taxes to the government which, in turn, allocated public funds to finance their education in state-run universities.

Unfortunately, today, we have some 200,000 unemployed (or unemployable?) graduates in Malaysia. The public sector has already absorbed as much as it could. Many would argue that the civil service is already “bloated” and operating expenditure on salaries and pensions already take up a large portion of the national budget (already reeling from lower oil prices and corruption).

As for the private sector, the reasons for graduate unemployability would depend on who you ask. Employers would say job applicants are picky and demanding, expect unreasonably high salaries and, perhaps, unable to speak fluently in languages widely used in the private sector.

Graduates would say that the competition for jobs is tough, the pay too low for them to live decently in the city or the work not matching what they have studied.

But there is also another factor at play: technology. Most factories are increasingly using higher levels of technology. In fact, it is hard for new investors in the market to challenge the established brands whose technology has evolved over the decades.

For example in the old days, it would take a few months for an investor producing cars to come up with the first car for sale. Now it takes a few years for a new model to enter the market. Such is the level of advances in sophistication, observed Schumacher.

The choice now for many job-seekers is taking up jobs involving the latest technology or settling for repetitive assembly line work or other work that does not tap into the creativity and potential of the ordinary worker.

Moreover, specialisation and globalisation means foreign investors set up facilities to produce components in or outsource the production of such components to low-wage countries where workers can be hired cheaply.

“The role of the poor is to be gap-fillers in the requirements of the rich,” lamented Schumacher. Certainly, investors don’t see it as their role to empower the marginalised.

So what are our 200,000 unemployed graduates and the thousands of other unemployed going to do?

It is obvious what they have been taught, what they have learned is not doing them much good in finding work, or the lowly paid work that is available.

For Schumacher, the problem is we have made job creation difficult, overly reliant on sophisticated technology and subject to a host of pre-conditions.

For him, development and employment is the most natural thing in the world. “It occurs in every healthy person’s life. There comes a point when he (or she) simply sets to work. In a sense, this is much easier to do now than it has even been in human history. Why?Because there is so much more knowledge. There is so much better communications.”

Mind you, Schumacher wrote this before the internet age, before social media, before smart phones!

“You can tap all this knowledge… So let’s not mesmerise ourselves by the difficulties, but recover the commonsense view that to work is the most natural thing in the world. Only one must not be blocked by being too damn clever about it.”

Especially when it comes to infrastructure planning. Schumacher pointed out that some of the world’s most magnificent monuments, the Taj Mahal and the cathedrals of Europe were built without electricity, cement and steel.

“No country that has developed has been able to develop without letting the people work.”

So the question boils back to what kind of education we receive. “What sort of an education is this if it prevents us from thinking of things ready to be done immediately?”

“The really helpful things will not be done by the centre; they cannot be done by big organisations; but they can be done by the people themselves.

“If we can recover the sense that it is the most natural thing for every person born into this world to use his (or her) hands in a productive way and it is not beyond the wit (of people) to make this possible, then I think the problem of unemployment will disappear...”

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