As we reported on Wednesday, the unemployment rate is down to 2.1%. And as has been clarified by those at SIB, to be considered unemployed, you must meet three requirements, one of which is that you are actively looking for work. We asked the PM about the figure, and whether he believes it translates to what's being felt on the ground.
To him, it does since there are over 15,000 more workers now than there were four years ago.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I think first of all I would challenge you to say that people don't feel it, people are feeling it, people are working. Pretty much most people that want to work can find a job. There's some people that want a special kind of job and they can't find it so they don't go to work. So people are feeling it, that's why there's this renewed sense of optimism and hope in Belize, because people are working. When you look, I'll use a simple example, the call centers, in November 2020, there were approximately 2,500 workers, today we have 16,000, actually it's about closer to 18,000 right now. This year, they are going to be paying out 134 million dollars in salaries. It's mostly young people, and guess what, more than 60% of people working in call centers are women who had difficultly finding jobs. You could speak to most business people and they would tell you that they have difficulty in finding people to work and I would challenge you, both of you, take the time out and ask them how they feel about jobs. They don't have enough hands so there is a lot of work. Now and I'm glad that I listened to the news section, which again Channel 7 did, when they were asking her to explain how it's calculated. What the director pointed out, Ms Trejo Castillo, Diana, pointed out that they are following the classification that is done internationally, it's not done in Belize, but there are different classifications. She said that about a 1/3 of the people are retired so you can't put them, but they have the whole number, so you have to take that out. You have another 1/3 that are under the age of 14 so they are not working. Then you have some people that can't find the job they want so they're not interested and some just don't want to work. We can't force them and count them as part of the employment group of people who want to to work, they're not interested, so we have to deal with the people that want to work and are trying to find a job and so today we're finding out it's 2.1%."
We also asked him whether he believes those businesses that are unable to find workers should be allowed to import them:
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I think so, agree. We should. And we spoke about that in Cabinet and we need to make it easier. We need more workers, that's the reality. We need to keep this economy growing. My aim is to be able to have at least a 5% growth every year but to do that we need the workers and if there's a shortage of workers we need to consider whether we want to allow businesses to bring in, of course we have to make sure our citizens are working first. when there's a shortage then we believe that we need to bring them in."
