Mahmoud Seddik - Cairo
"The Illusion Forum", this is how Egyptian Member of Parliament Ibrahim Ibrahim Al-Qassas described one of the youth employment forums that have spread in recent years, stressing that one of these forums in Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate, north of Cairo, witnessed 5 deaths as a result of crowding out from job seekers.
The MP added in a television interview that the way to announce such gatherings makes citizens think that they offer government jobs, eventually to find that they are private sector companies requesting sales representatives with commission without a specific salary.
Whereas, Minister of Manpower Muhammad Sa`fan defended the idea before the Labor Force Committee in the House of Representatives by saying, “Because after every employment forum, forms are received with the number of opportunities in which young people are housed, so young people must accept the available work opportunities until they find other suitable opportunities.”
What is the truth and nature of the jobs provided by these forums? What drives some young people to think that they are government jobs? Do these forums really contribute to reducing unemployment rates, according to the statements of the participating ministries, or are they just "informative news"?
Evaporation of hopes
Alaa, one of those who attended the recent youth employment forum at the Gezira Youth Center in Cairo, said that the high hopes that I built on the forum were evaporating with every company that passed by to fill in the employment form.
Alaa emphasized in her speech to Al Jazeera Net that all the companies that passed through her only provided forms for recording data, e-mail, communication sites accounts and WhatsApp numbers for each applicant, with employees of those companies assuring applicants that the appropriate job will be provided and contacting us.
The applicants did not feel any credibility for the advertisements that promoted the forum with newspapers, websites and social media. Rather, the whole topic does not exceed "Shaw", as described by Alaa.
Alaa Najeh is a young graduate of the Faculty of Science who wanted him to search for a suitable job opportunity, and when he heard about one of the employment gatherings that took place at Mansoura University, north of Cairo, he went, invoking his mother’s calls to find a suitable job after years of waiting, and he had to travel from his village to try to seize one of the thousands of job opportunities Announced.
But what he found successful, he said to Al-Jazeera Net, are just companies that ask for temporary jobs that they call public relations representatives, which are really just a job for sales representatives who do not have a fixed salary, but rather a commission based on what is sold.
"You find the employee of the company says to you, you can earn from 5 thousand to 12 thousand pounds if you can sell goods of 300 thousand pounds," Najeh says.
The biggest problem is that most of these companies sell products with very high prices and have no popularity such as medical equipment and chairs for dentists, and some of them ask you to take a file with pictures and drawings of apartments in the new administrative capital exceeding two million pounds (the dollar equals about 16 pounds), and asks you to Passing the owners of big companies to market them, according to Najeh.
Please the president
Ahmed Obaid, the recruitment manager of one of the companies participating in the last forum at Al-Jazira Club, believes that most of the young people who flocked to the forum came with more optimistic ideas, some of them say that he heard about the existence of jobs with salaries starting from 5 thousand pounds, and some of them believed that they are government jobs .
Obaid said to Al Jazeera Net that the majority of visitors to the forum ask us questions about the salary and the nature of the work, and most of them refuse the non-office work or that requires effort, in addition to their refusal to start with lower salary numbers than what they read about in the announcements of the forum.
Obaid attributed these beliefs among the youth to the way that the government agencies, organizing bodies of the forum and some of the companies participating in the exhibition announce on their sites, where the numbers are inflated, adding, “If there is a company that requires one job with a large salary, it is highlighted in the advertisement with salaries of up to 6 thousand pounds Here, young people's minds get confused. "
Ihab Fawzi, the owner of one of the companies that participated in the employment forums, blamed the ministries of manpower, solidarity and youth for the mistake of understanding the nature of these activities, explaining that the way the three ministries announced the date of one of the employment forums comes in a human form that the ministry broadcasts on thousands of jobs and large salaries.
Rather, the minister opens the forum himself and is announced in various media outlets, and then puts the numbers announced within the achievements of his ministry in the field of employment and eliminating unemployment, according to Fawzi to Al Jazeera Net.
Here the owners of the companies fall - Fawzi completes his speech - between the two sides who expressed optimistic ministry announcements and the curses of young people, some of whom believed that the decent jobs that existed went to knowledge and cronyism, while others believed that the forum was merely a show of fake jobs and a government review to satisfy the president.
Control and corruption
Economic expert Dr. Sharif Al-Demerdash balances the opinions of young people and owners of companies by saying that employment companies are a system that exists in the whole world, and cannot be judged in isolation from society as a whole, there is the good and the bad, but every system in its performance and discipline needs to be controlled so that corruption will not eat it.
In press statements, Al-Demerdash added, just as there are young people who rise from work except under certain conditions and salaries that put him in his mind, there are also companies that do not provide suitable job opportunities or advertise fake jobs.
He added, "In the event that the human element is not available, the local product to which Egypt aspires to maintain its economy will not increase strong and prosperous. There must be specialized human cadres in all fields in order for the economy to consolidate and the unemployment rate in society to decrease."
The Egyptian Cabinet announced that the unemployment rate in the country decreased to 7.5% during the second quarter of this year compared to 8.1% in the first quarter, and the unemployment rate was 9.9% in the second quarter of 2018.
A statement of the Central Agency for Mobilization and Statistics (government) stated that the number of unemployed amounted to 2.267 million in the first quarter of this year, a decrease of 827 thousand from the corresponding quarter of 2018, and a decrease of 224 thousand from the fourth quarter of last year.