Full Employment – follow up to the earlier post! Eating too many lotuses?

Here I am in Ratmale, a small farming village near Minneriya, surrounded by forests and tanks all around. The harvest is in, and I cannot find anyone to thatch the roof with Coconut fronds! (Pol Athu)

All it takes is just 4 people, working for 5 hours together to thatch this roof. Everything else is already in place, and rafters are ready to accept the Coconut Fronds. The payment for this is Rs1,200 for each person which is the going rate here at the moment. Though it is the daily rate, even if the work is finished in 5 hours one has to pay the daily rate. THERE IS NO ONE AVAILABLE TO DO IT!

See link to my post on full employment for some of the POSSIBLE reasons.

http://kalpanakaranna.blogspot.com/2016/08/sri-lanka-is-at-full-employment.html

We have idiots calling themselves, economists and pontificating for the last 70 years and they have NOT been able to get it right. Shame on you, all of you!

What does it tell you? People are otherwise usefully and productively engaged in work that earns them more that this daily wage, and I may have to raise it to Rs2000 for 5 hours work before I find any takers. That means the uneducated villager needs to be paid more than a qualified doctor to work here in the jungle!

It was Sunday yesterday, even the Govt. servants are at home. If they want to they can earn a little extra by working on their Sunday, after all they don’t break a sweat in their jobs anyway, doing the minimal work and wondering into their job whenever they want! You have heard many moonlight even during working hours. Obviously they must be earning more than enough on their day jobs that they do not wish to earn an extra buck.

Sri Lanka needs a new economic theory for her growth. Money is NOT the only factor here, and if it is to get people to work the amount one has to offer does not make the work economical, unless you are able to borrow from foreign banks and Countries, and pay high salaries to give people jobs, that do not produce anything, like the previous administration overloading the Public Sector with 1Million people at a huge cost to the rest of the Country, to say nothing of having to pay debts to foreigners just so that people can call themselves Public Servants and actually lead the public a dance, when they go to them for public service! This is the common complaint, but does anyone have the brains to find a solution.

We as a Country need at least 100,000 mental health Councilors to administer to the mental well being of our population, that is NOT even taken into account in the 250,000 vacancies. Maybe we can re train some in the Public Service, so no one really loses out, but finds alternative and MORE REWARDING employment.. The problem is that too many are too lazy that they do not want rewarding, they just want to sit and lol about day dreaming and draw a salary. We MUST CHANGE THIS MINDSET - Mental Health Counselling anyone!!!!

There are NO quick fixes, we either import 500,000 people to fill the vacancies resulting in the consequences that may bring, or we drastically cut the public service to grow the economy. I trust the readers have heard the cry from the Construction Industry for workers from overseas to fill vacancies as there are no locals wanting or capable of filling them.