Why Kurdistan’s college grads can’t just roll their sleeves up and get to work
Deputy Prime Minister of the KRG, Qubad Talabani, set Kurdish social media on fire when he told Kurdish students on Twitter, frustrated at their lack of prospects on the job market, “if you are prepared to do so, you can make the best of this situation and do a job that is a bit below what you aspire to do”. As he went on to explain in a video he posted to his Facebook account today, “if for some reason, there are no opportunities available in a student’s field of study, there is no shame in going after an opportunity that is unrelated to one’s degree or program of study”. Mr. Talabani even offered his own story as an example: “I didn’t arrive at this post in the course of a day. I went through many stages, through hard times and trials…if tomorrow I was no longer in this position, I have enough experience that I could find a place for myself”. Notwithstanding the fact that that the Deputy PM has had many opportunities that are out of reach to the average Kurdish student, and while he acknowledges that the KRG has played some role in youth unemployment, his suggestion to Kurdish youths assumes that there is a job market to accommodate them. The truth is that even if they wanted to, most Kurdish students would not be able to find a job — any job — in the private sector.
According to the World Bank, Iraq created 750,000 jobs between 2005 and 2014, and 80% of those were in the public sector. The KRGs public sector growth actually exceeded the national average, with civil service employment increasing from 41.9% to 44.2% of all jobs between 2007 and 2012, outpacing growth in the private sector. At the same time, the number of college graduates increased by 98% between 2003 and 2013, with most of those graduates absorbed into the public administration, education, or healthcare sectors. While many developing nations seek to improve services through hiring in the public sector, much of this job creation and hiring was driven by clientelism rather than a genuine effort to improve the provision of public services in the KRI.
With the onset of the economic crisis, the public sector suffered from fiscal constraints and the KRG was forced to cut salaries, lay off salaried employees, and freeze hiring. The private sector (which was also subsidized heavily by the KRG, and its largest firms owned by loyalists of the incumbent parties) shrank rapidly due to capital flight, drops in investment flows, and a burst of the real estate bubble. Construction workers, which had comprised roughly 30% of private sector employment according to an MERI report, saw themselves laid off as contractors went belly-up.
There is another side to this issue as well — gender. Women in the KRG have the lowest work force participation rate in the MENA region, yet over 90% women in the Kurdistan Region’s work force are employed as civil servants in education, healthcare, and public administration — the very professions that were most severely affected by 2016’s austerity measures. Although male unemployment has been rising faster than women’s, female college graduates — which comprised nearly half of the KRI’s 115,000 post-secondary students in 2013 — will, in addition to not being able to find employment in their fields in the public sector, also face social barriers to employment in private sector services, such as in retail, dining, transportation, and construction. The effect is that, in general, female college graduates will seek work abroad or leave the labor force altogether.
To be sure, there is a general societal expectation in the KRI that the government is responsible for providing jobs and paying salaries and an aversion to work in the private sector where the pay is lower, the work is harder, and the hours are longer. However, this is an expectation that the KRG (and Iraqi) political class worked to cultivate over decades to ensure the loyalty of its clients. It is, therefore, disingenuous for politicians to express incredulity when people who were promised jobs and benefits in exchange for support or obedience then express frustration when they don’t receive the promised jobs or benefits. The same political culture also ensured that the already fragile private sector would be in no shape to absorb future college graduates. In 2016, while the Kurdistan Region was already in the midst of a deep financial crisis, the World Bank warned of a developing youth unemployment crisis, predicting that the private sector would need to grow by 10% each year to absorb future workers. In an economy that has been rapidly deteriorating, in large part due to mismanagement and corruption, it is simply not feasible to significantly lower the youth/student unemployment rate by encouraging students and graduates to find manual labor jobs in the private sector.
World Bank, Kurdistan Region of Iraq: Reforming the Economy for Shared Prosperity and Protecting the Vulnerable. 2016 http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/229971468195834145/pdf/106109-WP-P159972-KRG-Economic-Reform-Roadmap-post-Decision-Review-PUBLIC-v1-05-29-16-2.pdf
