The ministry of cooperatives, labor and social welfare has announced readiness to create jobs at cooperative businesses using unemployment benefits.
“Twenty trillion rials ($563.3 million at the market exchange rate) has been allocated to the employment of those entitled to unemployment benefits,” Minister Ali Rabiee said while addressing a meeting with top managers of the country’s cooperatives, Mehr news agency reported. “They are to be provided with opportunities to work in cooperatives.”
Iran has a social protection system that covers large segments of the society.
The ministry’s move could be interpreted as the government’s latest attempt to reduce its spending on social programs and tackle the rising unemployment rate, which according to the Central Bank of Iran currently stands at about 10%.
“If the cooperatives are ready to accept them (the unemployed), their salary will be partly paid by the government and partly by the employers,” Rabiee noted.
Article 44 of the Constitution stipulates that the national economy falls into three categories of public, cooperative and private sectors. It explicitly underlines the role and significance of the cooperative sector when it reads that public sector operations should be limited to a certain extent and that the private sector is complementary to the public and cooperative sectors.
10t Rials for Job Creation
The minister also said that the government has allocated 10 trillion rials ($231.5 million at market exchange rate) in the next year’s budget “to stimulate the employment market.”
Government revenues for the next year’s budget are estimated at 2,673 trillion rials.
The government is to offer technical assistance to factories and provide them loans to help compensate the rise in energy prices, he underlined.
Officials say the government needs to create nearly one million jobs per annum if it is to tackle the rising unemployment rate.
Job creation is said to be a very costly practice in Iran. According to Iranian officials, some 2,000 million rials is needed to create a single job in the country. In the oil and petrochemical sectors, the amount is said to be even higher at about 20 billion rials.
