Is Short Term Job Creation Sustainable?

Mark Lizarraga

In the budget, there is much focus on infrastructure, and it goes hand in hand with an unprecedented infrastructure spurt in all municipalities, with the promise of more to come. That all looks good on the ground, but Lizarraga says none of it is sustainable – certainly not the five thousand new short term jobs created by that works program.

Mark Lizarraga, Senator, Business Sector

“In this budget we see nothing, absolutely nothing…that says we’re going to stimulate employment further. It says nothing that we’re going to stimulate entrepreneurship. It says nothing about what we’re going to do to encourage businesses to grow, and what we’re going to do to create sustainable employment. The Prime Minister says that five thousand new jobs have been created in the last year, and the numbers we got from the Social Security Board will support that. But how many of those jobs are sustainable? What happens when we stop this spending? Yes there was employment for the first time in eight years – we saw this huge spurt in employment – five thousand in one year. The prior six years there was only five thousand more people employed over six years. We have five thousand more employees when we know we have five thousand plus kids coming out of school every year. So in seven years you’d expect thirty-five thousand jobs to be created. We’ve only created ten thousand jobs according to the Social Security report. We’ve only created ten thousand jobs in the last eight years. That’s not enough. How are we impacting the poverty rate in this country with all this spending? Are we moving five percent of the people out of poverty…ten percent? How can we measure it? There’s no measurement that indicates that we’re making an impact on moving these people out of the poverty level.”

We will have more in the budget in the days to come.