Gov’t being dishonest with data on unemployment-Minority

The Minority in Parliament has disputed employment data presented by the Labour and Employment Minister, Ignatius Baffour Awuah.

The Minister taking his turn at the Meet the Press Series on Thursday told journalists that “People who are actually not working and made efforts to look for work and did not obtain work summed up to 422,000. So strictly speaking these are the unemployed persons that we have on our hand,” he said.

Mr Baffour Awuah also claimed an additional 417,000 people have given up looking for jobs out of frustration and lack of hope.

“I will also agree that, somebody will decide that I will not go and look for jobs at all because even if I go I will not get. So I will make no effort…Their number is 417,500. So if you add that to those who are looking for work but are not getting it, the percentage then moves [from 3.7%] to 7.1%.”

However, the Minority says the data presented by the Minister did not the real figures.

Deputy Ranking Member on the Employment, Richard Quarshigah, unemployment figures have actually risen since the governing New Patriotic Party came into power.

According to him, the data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) 7 which the Labour Minister appeared to have used in his presentation, deals with the indexes of poverty by employment status of household heads and not the entire individual labour force of the population or the country.

“The actual employment data is, however, comprehensively dealt with in GLLS 6 Labour Force report. The GLSS 7 was published in August 2018 and not in 2019 as claimed by the Minister.

“This clearly shows, they do not know which report actually contains the labour force statistics,” he stated.

By: Rashid Obodai Provencal