The employment service keeps its clients unemployed
By Pavlo Zlenko
For the 518,700 unemployed in Ukraine, there are about 2.2 million vacancies. The reason for this gap is that most of the unemployed are not capable of doing the job that is offered.
In 2008 the government put into force a program to quarantee college and university graduates of listed majors with a first job through a state subsidy for their employer. The law and provided financing gave lots of reassurance. The labor agreement is to be signed for 2 years and full employment salary during the first year will be compensated from the state budget. However, it referred only to graduates beyond the number of state scholarships or to those former unemployed people that were sent for professional education through the Employment Service. Lots of graduates educated with state scholarships are forced to submit employment documents (sometimes fabricated) before graduation, in fact remaining unemployed. Otherwise institutions might be accused in improper use of state money. While the employment service can hardly find employers to give subsidies to: in all of Sumy region, there were only 34 eligible employees.
Another program on re-training to the unemployed provides workplace internships for specific jobs requested by employers, from 2 weeks to 3 months depending on complexity, while intern gets full unemployment payments from the state. In 2007 in Trostyanets, 31 private businessmen did that, 52 people interned with them. The first half of 2008 surprised with even better results: 54 people did an internship at a workplace, and 20 of them were at the same private bakery “Tabiti”. It turned out that … the head of the state enterprise and local parliament deputy gave to his own private business most of the baking equipment and almost all production. The director of the private bakery is his son, whose wife works at the unemployment center. For the formal reason of reorganization, plant fired 20 bakers, but most likely gave them all a spoken guarantee to employ them when the private enterprise rents out the equipment. The employees registered at the unemployment center. In a week or two, these people came back to the same workplace and continued to work, but under the referral of the employment center. Everything remained the same for them, only the employer changed. For 3 months, these people got internships as students and then got hired as qualified specialists.
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