Those who run the Islamic Republic are right when they claim that issues of unemployment or jobs for the young did not begin with their regime nor is it confined to Iran. Indeed, it could be said that the problem not only antedated this regime, but was indeed instrumental in foisting the Islamic regime on our society. Furthermore this is a problem all capitalist regimes face – regardless of their level of development.
But the rulers of Iran are hypocritical liars when they go on to blame it on natural or divine calamity of uncontrolled population growth. Or when they play down its scope and compare it favourably even with unemployment in advanced capitalist states. Increased unemployment in advanced capitalist countries, where populations may even be shrinking, cannot be blamed on population explosions. Moreover, even their own data show that the real reason for the catastrophic dimensions of unemployment in Iran today cannot be laid entirely on the doorstep of an uncontrolled population growth. Indeed the average rate of population growth in the two decades after the revolution is below that of the two decades preceding it.
As one of its own economic experts admitted, the Islamic Republic committed a fundamental historic error in this regard which catapulted the issue of youth unemployment to such a magnitude as to eliminate the regime’s historic chance of survival. The issue that those running the Islamic regime have called a calamity or “national dilemma” or as Khatami put it “the great challenge for the next decade” requiring a “mobilisation of the national will” is in fact a national crisis which is not easy to redress.
Not only this generation of youth, but future generations will be affected by its tragic consequences. Its solution does not lie in minor reforms within the present system, nor even with the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. It requires a fundamental and historic upheaval in the current economic and social order.
At the centre of this disaster is the fact that 24 million Iranians, 40% of the population, are aged 15-30, less than half of whom have access to jobs. This compares to official employment figures – excluding those aged 30-65 at work or seeking jobs – of 14.5 million (which includes even those in military service). Yet in addition to the existing figures on unemployment, or the regime’s claim of 9.1% unemployment figures, 800,000 people enter the job market every year, not including young women who are officially excluded from the list of job seekers. With all its efforts the government has only been able to, or can hope to, provide jobs for 200,000 anually.
Consequently counting the women, 1.5 million enter the unemployed list every year without any prospect of a job. According to Ahmad Tork Nejad, deputy minister of labour and head of the Organisation for Vocational and Technical Education, by 2006 this figure will reach 9 million, while by end of that year 44 million new jobs would need to be created [1].
Even though these figures are in themselves striking, to understand the depth of the crisis, as well as the official lies, it is useful to place it beside the government’s job creation capacity. I will again rely on the figures of one of the regime’s economic experts.
Assuming a minimum of 200m rials ($2,600 on official exchange) invested for every new job, we would need 80 trillion (million million) rials to create for example 400 thousand jobs annually – 15-20 times the development budget [2]. Remember this is the decade of “economic reconstruction”: the fall in oil earnings, the economic crisis and the foreign debt have reduced the ability of the government to invest in job creation to below zero. The projected tax revenues for 1999-2000 is a mere 2.5 trillion rials [2].
Undoubtedly the youthening of the population, beginning in the 1950’s and resulting in a population increase of 18.5 million over the next four decades, cannot be ignored. But this cannot be allowed to remain the sole explanation, as the regime wants us to believe. Because:
First: despite commonly held beliefs the proportion of young persons in the population has actually fallen over the last two decades. Despite their religious prejudices, and the fact that for a time they actively promoted more births as a divine gift, the Islamic regime has been relatively successful in curbing the population explosion [Table 1].
Second: the problem of youth unemployment is the direct result of a catastrophic fall in the gross domestic product and in the structural ruin of the material and productive foundations of the country’s economy [Table 2].
Third: the size of the population increase, and the labour force, is not such as to make it impossible to provide for this so called “excess population”. The historic mistake of the Islamic regime was ignoring the youthening of the population and the fundamental structural changes in the labour force (which took place mainly in the last two decades), and failing to make moves to counter them. Indeed it went further and wrecked existing facilities. Moreover, one can show through numerous examples how the very existence of the archaic Iranian regime, that is the politico-ideological element, has been, and remains, operative in worsening youth unemployment.
Official figures confirm that although the population has been increasing over the last four decades, the proportion of young has indeed fallen. However, the GDP in the last two decades had fallen five fold in relation to the previous two decades [table 2]. The growth in investment during in the first two decades of the life of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been under 2% and was negative in 1997. To maintain unemployment even at the current official rate of 9.1% in the next decade the investment would have to grow by 6.5% every year.
The rulers of the country have failed to notice three major changes in the country’s labour force over the last two decades:
a) Getting younger b) Changing gender ratio and c) changes in education and training. Furthermore by ruining the structural foundations of Iran’s economy and production over the last two decades and continuing to this day, they have eroded the means of dealing with the problem of youth unemployment - both in quantitative terms, that is in relation to the predicted increase in the population, as well as qualitatively, i.e. in relation to the structural transformation of the labour force.
The population of Iran has been youthening over the last half century. Yet despite the recent deceleration in recent years its belated effects are peaking now. The first signs of the juvenation of Iran’s population was uncovered with the first census of the country in 1956, which found that 57.6% of the population were under 35 (44.2% under 15).
As the population growth rate rose, so did the absolute number and ratio of those aged 15-24: from 2.9 million in 1956 to 12.3 million in 1996 (15.3% to 20.5%).
Officially only 3.8 million of the 13 million young (aged 15-24) are considered economically active. Of these, 3.1 million (81%) are at work and a further 730,000 are unemployed (seeking work). The same statistics state that youth make up 21.3% of the population but 50% of the unemployed (seeking work). In other words the young (15-24) make up one in every five persons living in the country and one in two of the unemployed (seeking work).
The meaning of these figures is crystal clear. Even if we ignore the ruined economy and two decades of structural disruption in the productive architecture of the country, the Iranian economy would have to make a several fold jump merely to keep pace with the explosive consequences of its workforce getting younger. But consider this:
a. Add another five years and call all those aged between 15 and 29 youth, and you effectively double the number of the young to 24 million – 40% of the population.
b. The population has doubled over the last 40 years yet there has been a 13% fall in industrial production. Furthermore the economy has become simplified and cannot cope with the qualitative complexities arising as a result of the structural change in the workforce. As I will discuss below, the problem of youth employment is not merely job creation. For example you cannot just create jobs in the agricultural sector and transfer skilled labour from the service or manufacturing sectors to it. Or as an economist suggested, expel 1.5 Afghani or other foreign workers and replace them with 1.5 million workers made redundant from factories.
The economic prospects are so grim that Dr Nili, deputy to the Planning and Budget Organisation admitted in April 1999 that if things go on as they are the gap between ourselves and other countries will widen. In the next 10 years domestic income will be 1/20th of South Korea, 1/7th Malaysia and 1/4th of Turkey.
c. The crisis of economic impoverishment has totally upset the structure of employment. Official working hours have become meaningless, as have the official age for employment. According to the 1996 census 700,000 of those at work were over 65 (1.2 million over 60) which, say the experts, the economic disorders has forced to enter the job market. To these we must add the officially admitted 250,000 children working to make ends meet.
Despite a doubling in population the government has not officially created a single job for women. Between 1966 and 1996 the number of women at work has been officially reported to vacillate between one million and 1.2 million. This is less than 10% of the workforce. Despite efforts by the regime to push women out of official employment and other sexual discriminations, women, and in particular young women have entered the job market in increasing numbers. According to official figures of the women make up 16% of the employed youth, accounting for 27.3% of all women workers. This compares to 21.1% of young men at work.
Women, especially young women, occupy a much larger proportion of unofficial jobs. More than 2.5 million work in carpet weaving and women make up 50-70% of the agricultural workforce. Moreover, 14.5% of Iranians aged 15-24 are in universities or other education facilities – 45.8% of them female [60% this year see footnote 3]. Nearly one third of households are headed by women. One million households are so called “unsupervised families” or headed by “single mothers” who are mostly below 30 years of age. The gender transformation of the labour force is an undeniable reality.
Quoting Massoud Nili again: In a departure form previous years he called for the creation of over 650,000 jobs for women. Accordingly one fifth of the 3.5 million job seekers in the Third Development Plan are female.
This too has changed, making the issue of jobs for the young more difficult when placed beside the economic disruption in the country. For the first time we face an imbalance in the needs of the job market and the economy and the education and skills of the workforce, particularly the young. As one economic expert in the macroeconomic section of the Plan and Budget Organisation put it: “the existing structures are not very effective in removing the problem of the increasing workforce of the country, who are mainly young. A fundamental shift in these structure is inescapable.”
Literacy rates have grown from 15.4% in 1956 to 79.5% in 1996. In particular in the decade of 1986-96 literacy rates in the 15-24 year olds grew to 92.9%. Although 10.7 million aged 6 or over are illiterate, only 8.2% of these are young.
In 1996 of the 52.3 million population aged over 6 years, 19.3 million (37%) were in an educational establishment. 4.5 million of those aged 15-24 (46.5% of the young) were studying while there are not enough jobs to satisfy even one in five. As we mentioned above 14.5% of those being educated are in universities or similar institutions. Because of this imbalance, despite the extraordinary need of the country for technical skills and higher education in the various branches of the economy, we face the question of the unemployed graduates for the first time.
Official figures give the number of unemployed graduates as 15.2% while only 0.5% of those working in agriculture and 3.8% of those in industry have undergone higher degree. According to Mahjoob, president of the Labour House, of all those registering for work in 1997 in the ministry’s job seeking centres around 72% were without any technical or trade skills [4].
At present, according to official statistics youth employment is 20.3% in agriculture, 36.6% in industry and 41.7% in services. This shows that the young are more attracted to work in industry, although a large proportion are in services. The ratio of the young in agriculture is 18.7%, in industry 28.5% and in services 19.7%. Thus of every 7 persons working in industry, two are aged 15-24.
The question of youth unemployment is more an uncontrolled population growth. It results from the ruination of the economy and of manufacturing over the last two decades. The regime is incapable of giving jobs for the 24 million young (40% of the population) nor is able to give a minimum living conditions to the 80% now living below the poverty line.
They, the humans who are the real source of wealth and prosperity, are seen in the Third Economic Plan as excess population, to be exported like other cheap commodities.
January
2000
|
Year |
Total population |
Population 15 - 24 |
|
1966 |
3.13 |
2.99 |
|
1976 |
2.71 |
5.01 |
|
1986 |
3.91 |
3.92 |
|
1996 |
1.96 |
2.77 |
Table 1. Mean population growth (percent) in those aged 15-24
|
Year |
GDP growth |
Growth in investment |
|
1959 – 1977 |
10% |
15% |
|
1977 – 1996 |
2.3% |
< 2% |
|
1997 |
2.3% |
Minus 1.5% |
Table 2. Changes in GDP and investment
Footnotes
Sources: Iran Almanac 1996; Hamshahri no 11 June 2, 1999; Hamshahri newspaper nos 26, 27, 28, August- September 1999; Atlas no 68 October 29, 1999.
1. Hamshahri June 2, 1999
2. Tadbir, no 96, September 1999
3. According to Majles deputy Elaheh Kupai’ the figure for 2001 is 60%.
4. Hamshahri June 24, 1999