Young people and public jobs: towards an economy that does not wait for the state

At a discussion session with final-year students at a Baghdad college, I asked them about their plans after graduation. The answers were strikingly similar: most were waiting for a chance to be appointed to a government department, and only a handful were thinking of starting their own business or working for a company. This was not laziness, as some like to claim, but a rational reading of a reality that gives a state employee what nothing else offers: a guaranteed salary, a pension and social security.

Therein lies the dilemma. Around 60 per cent of Iraqis are under 25, and hundreds of thousands of graduates and young people enter the labour market every year, while the state can no longer absorb them without loading its budget beyond what it can bear. Carrying on down this road means raising an entire generation that does nothing but wait.

Why are young people wary of the private sector?

The answer does not require complex studies. Private-sector workers often have no written contract and no social security, and can be let go at any moment. As long as that picture persists, any call to give up on a public-sector job will look to a young person and their family like a reckless gamble.

Young people will not leave the queue for government jobs until the private sector offers what that queue promises: security.

That is why steps such as extending social security and pensions to private-sector workers are the right start, provided they are actually applied and workers feel the difference in their pay and their rights, rather than remaining texts waiting for implementing instructions.

What can be done now?

• Linking university and vocational education to the real needs of the market, and building practical training into the years of study.
• Making it easier to register small businesses and exempting them from fees in their first years.
• Directing soft loans towards young people’s productive ideas rather than towards consumption.
• Celebrating local success stories in the media and in schools, because role models build a work culture more than speeches do.

A few months ago I met a young man from Diwaniyah who opened a phone repair workshop after years of waiting for a government job; today four people from his neighbourhood work alongside him. His story is not an exception but proof that the energy is there, and that what it lacks is an environment to nurture it.

At the same time, I have seen young people with real skills in programming, design and digital marketing working remotely for companies abroad, because they could not find anyone in the local market who valued what they know. They are a national asset quietly slipping away, and they could become the nucleus of an Iraqi digital economy if they found legislation that recognised their work and made it easier for them to get paid.

The state is not being asked to abandon its responsibility towards young people, but to change the shape of that responsibility: from a state that employs everyone to a state that enables everyone to work. That is the difference between an economy that waits for the state and an economy driven by the energy of its own people.