Minority calls out gov't over employment data

The Minority in Parliament has called out government over some employment data announced by the Employment and Labour Minister, Ignatius Baffour Awuah.

The Minister at the ‘Meet the Press’ series on Thursday, said Ghana’s unemployment rate stands at 3.7 percent.

“People who are actually not working and made efforts to look for work and did not obtain work summed up to 422,000. So strictly speaking these are the unemployed persons that we have on our hand,” he said. Mr Baffour Awuah also claimed an additional 417,000 people have given up looking for jobs out of frustration and lack of hope. “I will also agree that, somebody will decide that I will not go and look for jobs at all because even if I go I will not get. So I will make no effort…Their number is 417,500. So if you add that to those who are looking for work but are not getting it, the percentage then moves [from 3.7%] to 7.1%.”

But the Minority has accused the government of dishonesty in the figures put out.

According to the Deputy Ranking Member on the Employment, Richard Quarshigah, unemployment figures have actually risen since the governing New Patriotic Party came into power.

He said data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) 7 which the Labour Minister appeared to have used in his presentation, deals with the indexes of poverty by employment status of household heads and not the entire individual labour force of the population or the country.

“The actual employment data is, however, comprehensively dealt with in GLLS 6 Labour Force report. The GLSS 7 was published in August 2018 and not in 2019 as claimed by the Minister.

“This clearly shows, they do not know which report actually contains the labour force statistics,” he added.

There is more in the video below:

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Ignatius Baffour Awuah