Latin America Beats Europe and the United States in Job Offers

Employment is high mainly due to job informality and instability. There’s a lack of skilled workers.

The unemployment records of some of the countries in the European Union, such as Spain (22.9 percent), Greece (19.2 percent) and Portugal (13.6 percent), contrast with the levels of Brazil (6 percent), Uruguay (6.2 percent) or Chile (6.6 percent), where there’s a need mainly for skilled labor in certain sectors and “full employment” is no longer science fiction.

Brazil needs about 1.9 million qualified professionals in all its industrial sectors, and the government is already setting out to make the granting of visas to foreigners more flexible to cover the deficit.

The government of Uruguay, where according to president Jose Mujica there’s “a notorious lack of a qualified work force” in many sectors, is studying similar measures as the ones in Brazil and is also planning to encourage the return of many Uruguayans from abroad to cover part of the 25,000 new jobs that it foresees will be created this year.

In Chile, there’s a deficit of workers in mining, construction and agriculture, and in the first two sectors not only workers but skilled professionals are needed, Bruno Baranda, the undersecretary of labor, explained.

In the next four or five years, Chile will need to employ about 44,000 more people in mining, while the unsatisfied demand in agriculture will rise to about 38,000 jobs, he said.

In neighboring Argentina, an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent was registered in the fourth quarter of 2011, the lowest since 1991. There’s also an unsatisfied demand for qualified workers in many sectors, according to the report of the economic analysis house Ecolatina.

During the economic and social debacle in 2002, Argentina had an unemployment rate of 24 percent. That is one point more than the current rate in Spain, the country in the E.U. with the highest unemployment, with more than 5 million people without jobs today and a distressing rate of youth unemployment higher than 48 percent.

Panama, in contrast, can be considered an economy of “full employment,” since the unemployment rate was only 4.5 percent in 2011, according to Economy Minister Frank de Lima, who believes that his country’s challenge is now to generate skilled manpower.

Nonetheless, it is calculated that a third of the jobs in Panama are due to the so-called informal sector, in which the workers lack social protection and work rights; this is a weakness of the prosperous economy and labor in Latin America.

According to the International Labor Organization, around 50 percent of the workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, around 93 million people, work through informal labor.

Brazil, the economic giant of the region, has an informality rate of 42.1 percent, while Venezuela, which in December had a 6.5 percent of unemployment, is at 44.8 percent.

In Bolivia, only one out of five citizens has a formal full time job, and the other four face situations of instability, according to the calculations of social researchers. Unemployment in the country, according to the government, is at 5.5 percent.

In Ecuador, with 5.1 percent unemployment, the “underemployed” were 44.2 percent of the active workforce in December 2011.

The unemployment rate in Peru is 8 percent, but only 9 percent of the population has a “decent” job economically, according to Luis Gamero, the ex-vice minister of labor.

Colombia is a similar case. It closed with an unemployment rate of 10.8 percent in 2011, the lowest full year rate since the last decade, but the rate of informality was 51.1 percent.

In Costa Rica, unemployment is 7.7 percent, and foreign businesses report a lack of qualified and bilingual personnel. In Nicaragua, unemployment is also low (6.8 percent), but informality continues to be high, to the point that 70 percent of the jobs are in the informal sector. In Honduras, a country of 8.2 million residents, the number of unemployed and underemployed is more than a million and a half.

Something similar happens in Guatemala, with open unemployment of 3.5 percent and about 1.2 million workers (20 percent of the total) underemployed, and in El Salvador, with 7 percent unemployment and 43 out of 100 workers with unstable jobs.

Cuba, the only communist country in Latin America, which has an official unemployment rate of 2.5 percent, is on the one hand reducing the state payroll and on the other has encouraged “self-employment,” as it calls private jobs, that already add up to 358,000 people.

The latest work statistics in Paraguay for 2010 reveal a rate of unemployment of 5.7 percent and underemployment of 22.9 percent of the total workforce. Almost half of the wage earners that year did not even reach minimum wage.

The Dominican Republic has an unemployment rate of 15 percent. In its neighboring Haiti, the situation is dramatic: Of the 42 million people of working age, only 200,000 have a regular job.

In Mexico, Latin America’s second-largest economy with an official number of 5.6 percent unemployment, 4.2 million people are underemployed, and those that work in the formal sector of the economy are 13.4 million people.

The director of the economic analysis house Bursametrica, Ernesto O’Farrill, said that there is a deficit of 300,000 jobs each year in Mexico and that until a couple of years ago, the escape valve of unemployment was immigration to the U.S. But today that door is closed, partially because of the crises in its northern neighbor.

The Department of Labor in the U.S. announced this past Tuesday that the rate of unemployment in January was 8.3 percent, the lowest since February 2009, which made president Barack Obama state that the economic recuperation “is accelerating.”