On Friday the Department of Statistics issued its latest jobs report for The Bahamas as conducted in May 2012. As other commentators have already written, the decline in the overall headline unemployment rate from 15.9 percent to 14.7 percent masks an underlying economic weakness that cannot be ignored.
Unemployment in New Providence improved from 15.1 percent to 14 percent, while Grand Bahama saw an improvement from 21.2 percent to 17.3 percent. Much has already been made of a growing male/female divide which saw unemployment among men remain fairly stagnant (16.1 percent to 16 percent) while women saw their rate materially improve from 15.7 percent to 13.4 percent.
Caution has also been raised that many of the new jobs created may have been temporary. The Ingraham administration's 52-week pre-election job program is at risk of not being extended by the new government, at least not in its current form. The approximately 3,000 jobs created by this program, and whose holders may soon be out of work, is almost exactly the increase in the employed labor force between November 2011 (160,185) and May 2012 (163,330). Absent an acceleration in new job creation, The Bahamas may quickly find itself back at a 15.9 percent jobless rate.
The increase in discouraged workers, or those who have not looked for a job in the past month, paints a more troubling picture. Compared to the August 2011 report (as at May) when unemployment was 13.7 percent, total discouraged workers have increased from 11,900 to 12,955 persons. These potential workers are neither included in the total labor force, nor counted as unemployed. Including these marginally attached workers pushes the adjusted Bahamian unemployment rate to 20.1 percent. More strikingly, the overall Grand Bahama rate of joblessness rises to 26.9 percent overall, comprised of a 23.6 percent rate for women and an alarming 30.1 percent for men.
This is sure to have long-term social ramifications, even if these figures are somewhat overstated as they ignore the informal sector. The latest labor report also showed a large jump in discouraged workers in the Family islands, although part of this may be due to a reassessment of the size of the total and employed labor force compared to the prior period.
A growing percentage of these discouraged workers have never worked before, most likely recent high school and college graduates whose skills are now deteriorating due to lack of use or who were ill-prepared to enter the workforce in the first place. Youth unemployment rates are soaring globally, approaching 50 percent in debt-ridden countries like Spain and Greece. We encourage the Department of Statistics to produce a detailed labor breakdown by age to allow for a deeper analysis of this new dynamic.
The presence of foreign workers on work permits in the face of high unemployment has become a "political football" both here and abroad. In The Bahamas there were 7,091 work permits issued in 2011 (about 3.7 percent of the current total workforce), down 24 percent from 9,390 in 2010. According to former Minister of Immigration Brent Symonette in a February address to the House of Assembly, 53 percent of these (3,793) were given to housekeepers and handymen, jobs that Bahamians seem unwilling to perform. However, with the local ranks of the unemployed and discouraged now totalling over 40,000, we question whether the reality of an "honest wage for an honest day's work" will soon overcome the stigma of performing a supposedly "menial" job.
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