The Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations is pushing hard to establish a mandatory labour based planning document to be attached to all government projects moving forward.
The move will afford the government the opportunity to track the number of people each of its projects employ and use the data for planning purposes.
Minister of Employment and Labour Relation, Ignatius Baffour Awuah said the initiative is being aggressively pushed at cabinet level.
The Minister said the National Tripartite Committee level and the Social Partnership level have been discussing the issue thoroughly since planning without data is not effective.
“The challenges for the future of work are eminent and COVID-19 has given us a foretaste of things to come”, he added.
That sounds very plausible since the government could use the data to develop deliberate policies to drive employment upwards as they are often want to state.
Youth unemployment is a major challenge in our country and if the ministry is able to push forward this suggestion, it would give a clearer picture to planners to know how many jobs have been filled and how many are left to be filled.
However, though this sounds good on paper, most government contracts can be considered seasonal jobs because once the contract has been executed, the jobs are over.
What we expect is gainful employment where the beneficiary is going to work until he/she is indisposed or retired.
Hence, though the idea is welcoming, we would have preferred a database for all jobs created within a specific period to be captured nationally for all to access.
However, it is not bad to start with government contracts since it is also a means of tracking how many jobs government was able to create in fulfillment of campaign promises.
While we welcome the idea, we would urge the Ministry to aim at establishing a national database on employment to give an accurate picture of the situation on the ground.
