It has now been close to around 30 months that the international economic slowdown has set in. I have had the opportunity in these months to put forward my claim that this slowdown has affected us greatly, given the openness of our economy and our heavy reliance on tourism and the exports of goods and services for our economic growth.
However, I have also argued that our economy has proved resilient enough to withstand the challenge that this slowdown has posed and as such the slowdown in our economy has not been as great as that of other countries whose economy has features that makes them very close to ours.
Still, we cannot ignore the fact that for the last two years our economy has had either negative growth rates or growth rates at close to zero, even though there are some key indicators that are showing positive trends. All this is clearly a sign of a restructuring economy that is seeking to find a new balance after the big change it went through during the period lasting just under 15 years leading up to the end of 2001.
Not surprisingly, this restructuring is also affecting the labour market; and some of the data that emerges from the latest Labour Force Survey (June 2002) published by the National Statistics Office is an illustration of this restructuring.
One table that is supplied by the NSO relates to the main occupation of all the employed persons. This would therefore include those persons in part-time employment whose main occupation is in effect that part-time employment, but would not count any part-time employment where the person involved already has a full-time job.
It is important to appreciate at the outset that between June last year and last June, there was a slight drop in this count from 149,033 to 148,818. This represents a drop of 0.14 per cent. However, within this aggregate figure there have been some interesting changes.
Over the 12 months leading to last June, there has been an increase in the number of persons classified as senior officials and managers, professionals, service workers and shop and sales workers, and craft and related trades workers.
On the other hand, we have had a decrease in the number of persons classified as clerks, plant and machine operators and assemblers and persons doing elementary occupations. The contribution made by persons employed in the armed forces and by skilled agricultural and fishery workers is too small to have any significant impact while the number of persons classified as technicians and associated professionals has remained quite stable.
If one analyses the data by gender, one notes that in the case of females this general trend is repeated, except that in the case of persons classified as clerks we have had an increase (the general trend shows a decrease), while in the case of technicians and associated professionals we have had a decrease (the general trend shows very little change). In the case of males, the deviations from the general trends have been an increase in the number of persons classifies as technicians and professionals and only a little change in the number of persons classified as professionals.
The indication that one gets from this data is what prompted the title of this week's contribution. Jobs that require little or no skills other than possibly manual dexterity and a positive disposition towards the jobs involved, are on a downward trend while jobs that require a medium to high level of skills, be they blue collar or white collar, are on the increase.
The efforts of businesses to continue to automate their processes as much as possible, to achieve productivity gains through the buying in of new technology, to increase turnover while not necessarily increasing the payroll, has left persons with a lower level of skills with very few employment opportunities.
Another indication is that we are gradually but inexorably moving towards a service-oriented economy. This is explained by the increase in the number of service workers and shop and sales workers and the decrease in the number of plant and machine operators and assemblers.
The reduction in the number of clerks is explained by the fact that the computer has essentially taken over the work that has been traditionally that of a clerk. So although firms do require persons to do clerical work, they are not considered as clerks, as all too often they are expected to do work of a different nature, and probably having more responsibilities, apart from their clerical work.
Because jobs do not exist in a vacuum (they exist to create wealth in an economy), the wider context of all this is the changing economy in the face of increased competition and the international economic slowdown, which is where we started from. Membership of the European Union is likely to accentuate these pressures, as it will speed up the restructuring of our economy.
In effect the answer to the question posed by the title of this contribution is in my opinion - "It should not be the case".
I know this is a fudge. However, I believe that there are still those who feel that they can keep jobs going even if there is no economic justification for them to do so. And the longer this continues to happen the more difficult it will become to create jobs for the less skilled.
When the Employment and Training Corporation was set up some 11 years ago, there were those who had doubted its usefulness. There are still those who doubt its usefulness even today. It is a structure like the ETC that can provide the necessary training to the less skilled persons to maintain their employability in our changing economy and give them an element of job security.