Back to the dust

Who wants to push paper for a pittance? Fatemah Farag probes the revitalised appeal of a government job
"If government employment passes you by, grovel in its dust," used to be a long-standing popular saying of much wisdom. But if, at any time in the past 20 years, you were to ask people their opinion of a government job, they would most probably tell you that such employment was the pits: stable yes, but otherwise low in pay, prestige and incentive. So why did thousands take to the streets last week to demonstrate against age restrictions stipulated in the recently- announced 170,000 government job openings? They were not grovelling in the dust of the lost opportunity of a government job; all you had to do was listen to their stories to hear the unmistakable ring of the bitterness of watching your life pass you by as it becomes increasingly consumed by the frustration of poverty and chronic joblessness.
Just listen to Fatma Abduh, whom I met at the Labour Office in Heliopolis. Her father was a government clerk, her mother a housewife and her siblings three in number. The family worked hard, scrimping here and selling the odd piece of gold there, until the children had been given the benefit of a good education. After all, what else could parents want but to give their children the best -- the opportunity to be better than themselves?
"I graduated in 1989 from the Faculty of Agriculture," Abduh said. "By then it was clear that jobs in the government were not the best alternative, and anyway you would have to wait several years for an appointment. I was still hopeful, though. Are we not the fertile land of agriculture? How could I not find a job?"
But it happened -- or did not, depending on how you look at it. Fatma eventually reached the point when she could no longer bear the look of sorrow in her parents eyes, or her own shame of still depending on them. "I went out answering every job ad in the papers. They would tell me I needed English or computer skills -- no one wanted me with the skills I had. I did a few months of sales, eventually saved up for a computer course and did a stint as a secretary. All low pay, minimal prestige and unstable employment -- and me the apple of my family's eyes, the college graduate!"
To cut a long story short, when the opportunity of a government job finally did come almost 12 years later, Fatma, like so many others, felt this was her last hope. And so, when she went with her papers to the local office to file her application and found out that the age restriction (28 for college graduates and 24 for the graduates of technical schools) disqualified her for the jobs on offer, it was the last straw. There is bitter irony, perhaps, in the fact that participants in last week's protest demonstrations, described by the press as "youth", were closer to middle age.
The man who has come under the most fire for the disappointment vented by the likes of Fatma is the man who announced the job openings in the first place: Mohamed Zaki Abu Amer, minister of administrative development. In an exclusive interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, an exasperated Abu Amer confided: "I am not against these people. It could be my own brother suffering the same fate, and I understand the difficulty of their situation. But what can I do? I am the minister of administrative development and not the minister of unemployment!" (see related article).
The Ministry of Administrative Development was established in 1971 with the responsibility of streamlining, and, in general, modernising the government sector, which by then had expanded to unprecedented proportions. After the 1952 revolution, government bureaucracy was given the mandate of implementing massive social and economic development programmes, particularly after the great wave of "socialist" nationalisations of large and medium-sized economic and commercial establishments between 1961 and '63. The Egyptian bureaucracy grew from a mere 250,000-man operation in 1952 to approximately 1,200,000 in 1970, with the number of ministries increasing from 15 to 28.
The expansion was not just about the requirements of state-led development, however. It was also the function of a policy aimed at absorbing the large number of college graduates being churned out of an ambitious education programme; a salient feature of the new social contract initiated in the 1960s was that 'the sons of the Revolution' received the benefit of a free education (up to university level) and the promise of a government job upon graduation.
The share of government employment in 1960 was 10 per cent of the work force but between 1960 and 1976 the government provided 1,109,000 jobs, accounting 46 per cent of the total increase in employment. The "employment guarantee" worked as follows: every university graduate was given the right to apply for public employment two years after graduation, and in the case of secondary school graduates after three years. In 1973, the guarantee was extended to include lower educational qualifications, an extension that was quickly brought to an end in 1976. In all cases, however, applications were usually approved. In 1978, public enterprises were allowed to opt out of the system, which put the brunt of hiring on the shoulders of central government ministries, local government and local authorities.
According to Palmer, Liela and Yassin's The Egyptian Bureaucracy, "Functions overlapped and jurisdictions merged. Laws and regulations proliferated. The skills of the new graduates were not well suited to the demands of the moment ... [with] most having specialised in the arts, law or the humanities. Their lack of practical skills was exceeded only by their expectations from authority. As the years passed, the number of graduates demanding government employment would far exceed the needs of the bureaucracy."
The wage bill of the public sector became too much of a burden, and action had to be taken to alleviate the pressure. McCormick and Wahba, in their study Public Sector Jobs and Migration in Egypt, stated, "In the early '80s, the government responded by eroding real public sector wages and extending the waiting period for government jobs. By 1987, the waiting period had been extended to five years for university graduates and six years for secondary school graduates. To protect employment, the government resorted to compressing the wage structure by increasing wages at the lower end while keeping wages of the more skilled at a low level."
Official announcements for mass employment such as the one released in the press last week had ground to a halt as of 1985. Since then, the commonly-parroted "fact of life" is that one should not wait for the government to find a solution to life's problems -- the "bite the bullet" and "get a life" kind of discourse. But the cards of more than 15 years into the experiment of having the private sector become a major player in job- provision were called onto the table last week. And it is not just the people who are holding the government responsible for their unemployment -- estimated by the government as seven per cent of the workforce and by independent analysts at 17 per cent, 75 per cent of whom are young people. Just follow the statements of the current government, which has promised to deal with unemployment head on. In November 1999, Prime Minister Atef Ebeid announced the creation of 650,000 jobs in the government sector, while the Social Fund for Development had allocated LE2 billion for 200,000 applicants to start up small businesses. In January 2000, the prime minister once again announced the provision of 190,000 job opportunities for college graduates. In April 2001 came the announcement of 50,000 teaching positions, 30,000 openings in the Ministry of Health and 7,500 openings for people with disabilities. And finally, the 170,000 positions announced by the Ministry of Administrative Development.
Commenting on the government drive to create jobs, Mustafa Kamel El-Sayed, director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Countries, says: "This [creation of jobs within the government sector] may or may not be a return to the policy of job provision, but the important point is that the initiative underlines the dangers attached to unemployment, especially among young people."
Insight into the magnitude of unemployment is provided in a study by Ragui Assaad, a professor at the Humphries Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, which covered labour market aggregates and rates in Egypt between 1988 and 1998. Assaad found that of those entering the job market during that time, only one in every three found a job, a large percentage of those jobs being within the government and in particular the ministry of education. These findings are supported by Cairo University economics professor Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil, who argues that the government remains the main employer, providing 42 per cent of job opportunities.
It seems that, in spite of the fact that recession has rendered the government strapped for cash, and the private sector has not come through with the much-promised employment creation, the government is forced to step in and play the role of job provider.
So, are we back to the days when missing out on a government job was reason enough to send people into paroxysms of anguish in the dust?
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