WHILE THE vast majority of people of Cypriots will be out last-minute shopping today as many were yesterday, hundreds of people were lined up to register as unemployed and facing a poorer Christmas than last year.
Most Labour Offices around the island are busy from the moment they open their doors at 7.30am.
When the Cyprus Mail visited Nicosia District Labour Office mid-morning yesterday, it was still pretty full, with around 200 people waiting their turn to either register or sign on. The same number and more were lined up every day this week.
Savvas, a Cypriot in his late forties said he is not looking forward to Christmas. “We’ll tighten our belts and get through the holidays on the cheap,” he said.
Savvas is married with two children, and until recently was a foreman with a medium-sized construction company in Nicosia.
He said that he had been with the same company for three years on a contractual basis, but “when business started to dry up, they gave me the choice of carrying on as a simple builder or leaving. I wasn’t about to start taking orders from someone else after so much time as a foreman, so they sacked me.”
As for the immediate future, he said: “There are no real plans. I’m waiting to see what happens in the construction sector the New Year – it’s what I do. If there is nothing else, I’ll have to take a simple building job. The situation is very difficult. But I see things getting worse.”
Pointing inside the unemployed office, he said: “Look for yourself. There’s Romanian, Turkish Cypriot, all sorts of unemployed building workers in there. I am usually here for three or four hours at a time. And there is no point going somewhere else on the island.”
Savvas said that a big part of the problem with unemployment in the construction sector is that there are still large numbers of “informal” workers, in other words casual labour employed without registering with the Labour Ministry and Social Insurance Fund.
He said he did not believe that the inspections being carried out by Labour Ministry officials to combat illegal employment were effective, and it was “common practice for an employer to hire at least two or three casual foreign workers on low wages to complete a job”.
Costas, who is in his mid-twenties has been unemployed for three months. He studied agricultural economy but said he has yet to find a job that puts his university degree to good use. “I had a job relating to quality assurance with an industrial firm, but I decided that I needed to find something more relevant to my qualification, and left”, he said.
He was not optimistic about his job prospects: “I can’t say I’ve got any grand ambitions or plans. I need to hope that something will turn up in the New Year. I think there are opportunities out there, but these days companies are asking for specific qualifications and experience.”
Kalia, a qualified teacher in her early twenties with a degree in home economics, had her own take on the mismatch between qualifications and job opportunities, saying: “Everybody wants to study to be a lawyer, a teacher and the like. But we need electricians, plumbers and mechanics as well. Somebody who is technically qualified can earn good money.”
In her own case, she said she specifically wants to work in the public sector, but has been on the official waiting-list for teaching jobs since 2006. Last year she was teaching in a public school on a temporary contract, but recently she has just been on call as a supply teacher. She had therefore registered unemployed, and is prepared to wait for as long as it takes: “If my name isn’t picked in 2010, I’ll wait until the next year,” she said.
When asked about her prospects for a public sector job, given that there is growing consensus in political circles that the state payroll needs to be reduced, Kalia said: “We have a big problem in this country in the public sector: how can the state absorb so many employees? Given the situation, if cuts need to be made, the government should start with unnecessary public projects, like the plan to build bus-lanes.”
Unlike their fellow unemployed compatriot, Savvas, young single people like Costas and Kalia, who live with their parents, expect to spend a fairly normal family Christmas.
With record levels of unemployment in 2009 and government and EU forecasts pointing to a rise to over 6 per cent of the workforce in 2010, prospects appear to be grim for job-seekers well into next year.
