ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A record number of 187,000 workers across the Kurdistan Region have currently lost their jobs, raising unemployment from 6.5 percent in 2013 to 13.53 percent in 2015, according to data from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Statistics Board.
Out of more than nearly 1.4 million people who were employed in the workforce in Kurdistan, 70,000 in Erbil province, 74,000 in Sulaimani and 43,000 in Duhok are now jobless, confirmed Sirwan Mohamed, head of the Statistics Board.
“In 2014, 602,266 people worked in the private sector, but in 2015 that number decreased to 557,000 due to a halt in investment projects,” Mohamed said. He explained that in 2014 alone 45,000 private sector workers had lost their jobs in Kurdistan.
He said that in the public sector, 617,000 were at work in 2014, but that number decreased to 612,000 in 2015, meaning 5,000 government workers had lost their jobs last year alone.
Most Kurds have lost jobs because of Baghdad refusing to pay Kurdistan out of the national budget for several years, a war with the Islamic State (ISIS) that began in 2014 and a huge influx of war refugees from Syria and internally displaced from other parts of Iraq.
Narmin Ahmed, the acting manager of labor and social insurance in the KRG’s ministry of labor and social affairs believes the reason unemployment keeps hitting every sector in Kurdistan is that “the government does not have a strong plan.”
She suggests the KRG should think of “boosting other sectors, including tourism and agriculture, as part of its reform plans, as they are important to provide job opportunities for our youth and reduce unemployment.”
The KRG’s labor and social affairs ministry has launched three training centers across the towns of Kurdistan, registering unemployed people in efforts to find them jobs. But the move has not helped reduce unemployment.
Other data and figures published by the labor ministry indicates that the economic crisis has largely affected Erbil, more than any other place as unemployment was 4.3 percent in 2013, but dramatically climbed to 13.45 percent in 2015. The unemployment rate from 2013 to 2015 in Duhok has been 7.1 percent and 5.04 in Sulaimani.
The presence of foreign workers is another reason for unemployment among the Kurdish workers. The data has revealed that 37,363 foreign workers are currently employed in Kurdistan.
“The excuse for bringing in this huge number of foreign workers to Kurdistan by the ministry of labor and companies is that they keep saying domestic workers are not willing to do all kinds of work,” said Hangaw Abdullah, head of the Kurdistan Workers Syndicate.
Abdullah dismissed such claims, believing that “entrepreneurs and companies just consider their own benefits. They want to force workers to do most jobs for minimum wage. And when the domestic workers are dissatisfied, they (entrepreneurs and companies) claim that the domestic workers do not work.”
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