Thank you for inviting me to brief you and to answer questions today.
Social justice, decent jobs, and respect for fundamental rights have been at the heart of the Arab Spring movement going on in the Arab states. We have observed that freedom of association, employment, and decent work have featured prominently in the recent wave of unrest in Jordan specifically, with more than 550 labour-related protests and strikes since January 2011.
On the workforce situation there, despite 7% economic growth before the great recession, unemployment rates have remained between 12% and 13%. In addition, only 40% of the population above the age of 15 is even economically active. The country also faces one of the lowest female participation rates in the workforce, at only 14%.
Against this backdrop, large numbers of young people are entering the labour force, with over 70% of the population under 30 years of age. Young people between 15 and 24 years of age constitute 22% of the population, with most of them in school still, high school and university. But recent job creation in Jordan has been mainly in low-status, low-skill jobs, and that is not the expectation of Jordanian youth. They want high value-added jobs where pay is adequate. As a result, there are over 600,000 Jordanians already working abroad in mostly skills-intensive jobs. At home, unemployment stands for youth at 27%, more than double the overall rate.
The coming challenge will be to create sufficient jobs to absorb more than 60,000 new entrants, the majority of them youth, per year, and the government, which has been a traditional place of employment for about 30% of the population, can create only 10,000 of those 60,000 jobs.
The impact of investment policies on employment is uncertain. The trade liberalization has led to, as it often does, an increased dependence on migrant workers in export zones, in turn depressing real wages for unskilled labour. The net result is that jobs being created are mainly going to migrant workers, about 63% of the jobs created between 2005 and 2009. The foreign workers today constitute about half of private sector workers, which is about 27% of the general population of workers. Almost 90% of registered foreign workers, mostly in the QIZ, are illiterate. The majority are in the production, agriculture, and services sectors. In terms of nationality, they're about 70% Egyptian, followed by Indonesian, Sri Lankan, and Filipino.
What is the government response to their challenges, and what is the ILO response? The government has responded to the current wave of discontent by increasing/accelerating the reform process—constitutional law, legislative, social, and economic policy reform. They are pushing towards tightened restrictions on the employment of migrant workers, including through the imposition of quotas on certain jobs. Other jobs are giving explicit priority to Jordanians. The government has placed employment and decent work for Jordanians at the heart of its response strategy. They endorsed the national employment strategy in May 2011.
In direct response to that strategy, I'm excited to tell you that just last Sunday the ILO regional director, Nada Al-Nashif, the national chamber of industry in Jordan, and the General Federation of Jordanian Trade Unions, along with the labour ministry, formally signed a decent work country program, or a national framework strategy, for 2012 to 2015.
The goal is to support national initiatives to reduce decent work deficits and strengthen national capacity to mainstream decent work. There are three priorities.
The first is to expand decent work for young Jordanian men and women through the promotion of better work conditions, non-discrimination, and equal rights at work.
The second priority is to extend a minimum level of social security to the most vulnerable groups of society through the social protection floor.
The third priority is to enhance employment opportunities, particularly for youth.
There are many concrete measures that come with those priorities. I'd be very happy to speak to those. The crosscutting issues in each of those categories will include social dialogue, international labour standards, and gender equality. Each of these areas includes a number of micro and macro efforts in many technical cooperation projects. We're very grateful to say that they include some important projects supported by the Canadian government, CIDA, and the development organizations.
I imagine that I may be out of time, so let me just say that I'd be happy to discuss some of the concrete achievements so far and the specific initiatives going forward, and I would be happy to answer questions.