The country’s long-term unemployed mainly comprise young, highly educated workers, rather than elderly, low-skilled workers, a recent report by the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) showed.
Data analyzed by the council and obtained from the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics showed that the biggest group in the country’s long-term unemployed are those aged between 20 to 34 years old.
The data showed that in January, of the 115,000 who have been unemployed for 53 weeks or longer, 57,000 were between 20 to 34 years old, about 50 percent of the total long-term unemployed. Contrary to expectations, workers aged 45 or older only accounted for 27 percent of all workers who have been unemployed for more than a year.
Council officials attribute this phenomenon to the decreasing average number of children per family, which has contributed to the growing ranks of young people who rely on their families for support and are in no hurry to find a job. Some parents who have only one child may be in relatively good financial shape and hesitant to prod their child to find a job, officials said.
Workers with a college degree or higher made up 48,000 people of the 115,000 who have been jobless for more than a year, about 42 percent.
Officials said that as more workers become better educated, they are more likely to seek out high-paying jobs or be more picky when it comes to the type of job they want. If workers are not under financial pressure to settle for a less-than-perfect job, they may become one of the long-term unemployed, the council said.
In related news, the latest council statistics showed that the number of work-related deaths decreased from 330 in 2008 to 239 last year, a drop of 27.6 percent.
The rate of compensated work-related injury also dropped; in 2007, 4.439 people out of every 1,000 people were compensated for a work-related injury, but last year, the number dropped to 4.292.
The sector with the highest rate of compensated occupational injury is the construction industry (13.625 per 1,000 workers), followed by mining (7.468) and manufacturing (5.522).
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