Labor Watch- The Labor Watch warned of the continued high unemployment rates among Jordanian youth, which are one of the highest rates in the world.
This was stated in a position paper issued by the Jordanian Labor Watch of the Phenix Center for Economic and Informatics Studies on the occasion of World Youth Day, which marks the 12th of August in order to identify the reality of Jordanian youth and the challenges they face in the work, as well as keep abreast of policies related to their employment and choices.
The paper pointed to the exposing of Jordanian youth to many pressures that led to narrowing the future options for them, due to internal reasons related to the economic policies applied in Jordan during the past decades, which led to high unemployment rates significantly, reaching record levels compared with the majority, as well as the weakness of their knowledge and skills resulted by the weakness of the educational system, the gap between the specializations offered by the educational system, especially the university, and the needs of the Jordanian labor market, as well as the poor working conditions in the private sector which is the main source for the jobs opportunities.
The paper called the government to take into consideration the basic reasons that led to narrowing the choices for young people by drastically reconsidering their economic and social policies, especially the policies of employment and education, developing effective and fair employment policies and avoiding policies of a propaganda nature and focus on projects and investments that create a lot of decent work opportunities.
We believe that linking the current government to granting tax incentives to some economic sectors to employ Jordanians is a right direction step. In our view, we believe that there is a need to give incentives to the economic sectors that provide decent working conditions, it is also necessary to review education policies in various disciplines and levels in order to improve their quality.