Recently I read a news story about the difficulty faced by the Syrian Ministry of Industry in getting rid of a factory which was running at a continuous loss. Nobody was willing to buy the factory or even accept it as a free gift! The basic problem with the factory was its surplus workers.
The company manager said that 23 of the employees were of no use to the company because they were ill. Fifty-two workers possessed various specializations which were not related to the nature of work they did. The specialists were graduates in textile technology or chemical engineering or even in nursing. In all, 70 percent of the company’s workers were unproductive. The remaining 30 percent were expected to make a three-fold effort to make up for their nonproductive colleagues.
This factory is typical of the huge wastage that cuts at the roots of the productive sector in all countries of the Arab world. The authorities in these countries are apparently confused about how to treat such economic malaise and how to set their countries on a course of healthy economic growth.
The Syrian government — and other Arab governments — must learn how to tackle negative and unhealthy economic situations. The government-controlled Lebanese Television faced its economic problems with determination. The problems of Middle East Airlines should be sorted out in a similar manner. The Yemeni government did not hesitate to retire thousands of employees and security staff in a bid to overcome its economic problems. The government made the announcement of dismissal just a month before the move was taken.
The Syrian minister of state for development and administration said, with reference to the current controversy about the factory, that it was a case of unscientific distribution of workers that could be corrected if the required data were available. The minister’s observation is correct in my view. Data is the key to any attempt at correction. With the help of the right data, a nurse could be transferred from the factory to his or her proper place in a hospital.
One wonders, at the same time, when the government will begin taking corrective measures as government officials are responsible in the first place for appointing nursing college graduates to a factory or a chemical engineering graduate to a hospital.
The satisfactory deployment of workers will be an uphill task for any bureaucratic machinery if it is not equipped with comprehensive data on the available workers and the country’s employment requirements. The comprehensive economic regulations adopted by several countries have proved a heavy failure despite efforts to rectify the mistakes. Running away from the reality is not the way to solve economic problems.
No temporary or incomplete solutions will yield satisfactory results. Only radical measures will guarantee lasting and satisfactory solutions. However, the productive sectors such as factories, farms and commercial services should be handed over to the private sector while the government should help private investors solve the humanitarian issue of rehabilitating redundant workers in order to avoid an economic or political crisis.
