This week’s labour force survey makes for interesting reading on more than one count. It should serve as a wake-up call while at the same time it also, once again, exposes just how fundamentally flawed the survey is.
The figures published for Malta are alarming when compared to its European Union counterparts. The entire Maltese labour force’s employment rate, not to be confused with the unemployment rate, for 2009 was 54.9 per cent. That means that just over half of all those eligible to work are actually in employment and are effectively supporting the rest of the population.
Malta’s was the EU’s lowest rate and well below the bloc’s average 64.6 per cent rate.
Female employment stood at a paltry 37.7 per cent, as against the EU 58.6 per cent average, and was also the bloc’s lowest, as was the employment rate for 55- 64-year-olds, which stood at 28.1 per cent, also the EU’s lowest.
It was only in male employment where Malta stood, at 71.5 per cent, just above the EU average of 70.7 per cent.
As opposed to the labour force survey’s unemployment rate, when it comes to actual unemployment, Malta has the fourth best rate in the whole of the EU at 6.5 per cent. Unemployment here is a percentage of the labour force that is registering as unemployed. Unlike the labour force survey, those not interested in working, and as such do not register as unemployed, are not included.
Malta also has a very low percentage of those in precarious employment positions – 10.8 per cent of the employed engaged in part time work, as against the EU’s 18.1 per cent, and 4.8 per cent on limited duration contracts, compared with the EU’s 13.5 per cent average.
This is something of a bombardment of figures, but it is these very figures which, if viewed out of their proper context, can lead to a number of misassumptions.
The labour force survey is, it must be noted, fundamentally flawed if the figures it produces are to be used as a gauge of the workforce’s current or future potential.
The survey measures the employment activity of every person between 15 and 64 years of age. But, and it will be explained in further detail later on, Malta’s aim here is not exclusively to increase the sheer number of its workers, but rather to also increase the overall quality of those workers if the country is to find its appropriate niches in the global economy. And those niches will not be found in areas requiring manual labour, but rather in those that need skilled and knowledge workers.
And by including all those between 15 and 24 years of age, the labour force survey does not take into account those younger people who have elected to continue their studies past the age at which they are legally entitled to leave the educational system.
Far better, at least in Malta’s case, to have people within this age bracket still in the educational system rather than in the type of employment that unqualified people of that age group could find.
True, Malta, at 36.8 per cent in 2009, had the EU’s highest proportion of early school leavers on its hands. But that proportion has been shrinking consistently over the last decade. The rate was 54.2 per cent back in 2000 and it has been declining more or less steadily ever since.
That bodes well, but maybe not quite well enough, for the future of the country’s economy, which is, after all, hinged on the quality of its workforce.
A recent report found that the country’s workforce will need to undergo a drastic shift from low to high skilled labour if it is to remain competitive within the European Union in the years and decades to come.
If the government is to meet its employment and Vision 2015 targets, both the numbers of Malta’s workforce and its sets of skills will need to be expanded substantially. With 75 per cent of the Maltese workforce in 2008 falling under the ‘low qualification’ bracket and with 79 per cent of the European Union workforce, on the other hand, projected to have ‘medium to high’ qualifications by 2015, the situation is undoubtedly a major challenge for Malta’s competitiveness.
If Malta is to match the EU’s 2015 workforce skill target, it will need to find an additional 55,000 highly qualified workers and 99,000 medium qualified workers, while it would also need to ‘lose’ 77,000 of its low qualified workers from the labour force.
There is undoubtedly a quantum leap that must be made in the quality of the country’s workforce, and that quantum leap can only be made if more and more of the country’s late teens and early 20-somethings remain in the scholastic system for its full duration, a fundamental piece of the employment jigsaw that he labour force survey does not account for.