For the last three weeks we've been reporting on the labour situation in Belize. Entry level and manual labour is scarce - businesses just can't find people to do those jobs. We've heard from affected business operations, the Prime Minister, an economist, and the CEO in the Ministry of Economic Development. They all acknowledge the problem - but also acknowledge that there's no silver bullet solution.
Earlier this week we spoke via zoom with the man who HAS TO come up with a solution - and that's the CEO in the Ministry of Labour,Valentino Shal. Here's what he told us:
Valentino Shal, CEO - Ministry of Labour
"We do have a tight labor market, as we like to say in Labor economics. Now, that means that we are at almost full employment. Everybody who is looking for a job technically is able to find one."
"But while this is a good situation to be in, it creates new problems because then you don't have the the number of workers you would need as a as an employer if you wish to expand your business or you wish to do additional work within your business. And so you run into a shortage of workers, and that's what we are currently observing."
"So it is good that, you know, those who are looking for work are able to find work. But the other side of that very same coin is that where employers need more workers, then they are not able to find them."
"One way to alleviate it as you rightly pointed out, is to is to import labor and encourage labor migration, which we already have. We, you know, the entire agro industry, for instance, is very dependent on migrant labor. We bring a lot of workers from Guatemala, El Salvador, to work in the citrus and banana industries."
"But what would be an addition would be to expand this a bit more and probably bring in additional numbers of workers in order to alleviate the problem. But again, this is not something you just do without careful consideration, because, as you know, we want to be careful as to who we allow into the country."
"But bringing in workers is only one step in addressing this current shortage of workers. There are other measures that we are looking at. We have a current active labor force of over a little over 190,000 persons. But we do have what we call the "not in the labor force" or the "inactive labor force", and that number is around 139,000 - 140,000 people."
"They are not active in the labor force currently. And so that's a pool of workers that we have our eye on. We are trying to figure out right now, looking at the statistics to see why exactly they are not active in the labor force. So you start with the pool of people you have available before you think about importing workers."
Tomorrow in part two of our interview, you'll hear how Shal hopes to re-activate that dormant part of the labour market.
Email
Print