By Ahmed Elumami.
Tripoli, 25 December 2013:
Nearly LD twenty seven billion, or 42 per cent of the Libyan budget, are paid as . . .[restrict]salaries to 1.7 million public sector employees, due to the lack of interest in the private sector, it was revealed. There are also 200,000 to 300,000 with duplicate jobs receiving salaries.
At a conference entitled “The Libyan Labour Market – Reality and Future Prospects”, held today at the Radisson hotel, Tripoli, and organised by the Ministry of Planning and Institute of Planning, the reasons for the reluctance of young Libyans to enter the private sector were discussed.
The imbalances in the labour market in light of some international experiences and the role of government in reforming these imbalances to create job opportunities, were also debated at the conference.
“We are trying to discuss in this conference, the problems of unemployment and demographic changes in order to look at the future and to provide suggestions and solutions to the state to reform of the Libyan labour market” Deputy Minister of Planning, Abdulatif Al-Tounsi, told the Libya Herald.
The beneficiaries from this conference were both the Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Planning, Al-Tounsi explained, in order to use the the conference’s proposals to reduce the public sector and to reactivate the private sector.
For his part, the head of the Planning Institute, Omar Abu Osbai, told this paper that one of the reasons for the reluctance of young people to work in the private sector was “the lack of commitment to work-time in the public sector and the continuation of salary payments in all cases”.
He added that the number of employees in Libya was “scary and huge” comparied to the population of Libya.
The government also needed to review its employment policy since the problem is a, structural defect, Abu Osbai added.
In 2014, said Al-Tounsi, there will be a heavy reliance on the National ID Number which has shown that there are approximately 200,000 to 300,000 “phantom workers”, with duplicate public sector jobs receiving salaries.
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