Meaningful and decent employment opportunities

A meaningful employment means the one which pays sustainable employment for medium term, skill development and further training opportunities, movement through the ladder, lateral transfer opportunities. The stability of the job and forward or lateral movement is part of being meaningful. At the end a sustainable job should make people to be proud of their contribution.

Decent employment opportunity means people are treated with respect, given dignity of their privacy, flexibility to accommodate reasonable personal space and needs.

Meaningful employment is not easy to create anywhere but usually most difficult in developing countries. The first problem is the mindset. Many activities in the developing countries are run a family oriented private operation. At apex are some members of a family who own assets, for example land for agriculture, a shop in a prime location etc. There is lack of structure to assign responsibility, commensurate regular remuneration system, consideration of personal space such as leave and benefits for healthcare, future savings etc.

The entrepreneurship with modest effort to build something (product, service) will logically think about survival of the enterprise first and about employees next. It is the funds and resource crunch that diverts all resources towards product first and hardly leaves much resource for thinking about medium and long terms. Many entrepreneurship efforts would think about being gobbled up and thus not bother to think about long term. The policy and outlook for meaningful employment is at best just a thought to get the initial employment stage get going.

Self employed categories in developing countries lacks thinking about basic amenities and allocation or means of any such thing as stability and benefits for rainy day. In many developing countries in Southeast Asia, Rickshaw puller job is taken by the village or urban poor. Even without a pandemic, a simple flu can lead to a downtime. They do not have any health insurance, disability insurance or any insurance. These people do not even have access to toilets at the time of need.

At heart of enterprise formation needs some sort of ground level planning. This is lacking in both developed and developing countries. A product can be broken down into parts. Each part can be produced as part of an ecosystem. Each production system juxtaposed to the others can increase productivity. Multiple such systems across the different parts of a country will ensure guarantees against local disruption. The production system of similar components (or even dissimilar components with some logic) can help for societies to avail benefits for its members at affordable costs. Compared to the higher income members of the society at large members of such societies can avail bronze benefits compared to platinum one but such benefits may act as cushion for sustainability.

The Rickshaw pullers in some cities forms a union. However, such unions rarely institute good uniform ride rates, provision for sick days or health insurance and futures savings mediated by them but provided by larger insurance companies and banks.

In developed countries there are area business councils. However, the folks who serve liaison with the customers (entrepreneurs or others who can form enterprise) are usually not trained or not backed up by senior trained people or a board of trained folks, do not have network with financial or other institutions. This is key to not being effective for meaningful employment generation. Ultimately, this is a myopia of higher powers or lack of connectivity of the higher powers. In absence of encouraging such networked fragmentation of industries (component production to make an end product), connectivity to avail benefits and promote futures savings hamper realizing full human potential. Ancillary legal framework is tweaked from time to time, but they do not help realize the full potential. One example is increasing marriage age for girls from 18 to 21 years in India. This is not going to render females independent unless much more concerted efforts are made to provide meaningful employment and decent employment opportunities. Those should be done at all levels whether in developed or in developing countries.?