Jobs, jobs, jobs

Which candidate has most detailed, feasible plan?

Now that the three major candidates have thrown down their gauntlets, the three-month presidential race has begun. As always, it’s the economy that voters care about most. And the best way to improve the economic situation is to give jobs to those who don’t have them, and better, higher-paying ones to those who are currently employed. Are any of the three would-be presidents able to make this happen, and, if so, which one?

Predictably, all three contenders put job creation at the top of their priority list. There can’t be much difference in their basic approaches. But what matters are the details of their methods.

Park Geun-hye, the candidate of the conservative Saenuri Party, vows to create jobs by developing new growth engines, specifically through industrial evolution in the IT sector. That sounds good, but appears to be too distant to give prompt help to those who have to worry about tomorrow, or even today.

Moon Jae-in and his more liberal Democratic United Party (DUP) plan to provide more public-sector jobs and turn temporary workers into regular employees. It will give more immediate relief to people at the bottom of the job market ladder, but may prove to be costly and not permanent.

Ahn Cheol-soo, an independent runner not affiliated with any party as yet, is rather vague on this issue. He says the nation can “kill two birds with one stone” if the government goes all out to create jobs, while leaving economic growth to business enterprises. One can only guess the entrepreneur-turned-professor-turned politician’s idea is the division of labor between public and private sectors in adding jobs. But how many economic experts, and even non-experts, will agree to it?

Voters will know more details of the candidates’ plans soon. For now, however, none seems to dissolve popular anxiety satisfactorily.

This is lamentable, indeed, given the dire situation facing hundreds of thousands of young who are part of the jobless population, the 1.7 million self-employed people whose net monthly income is below 1 million won ($900), and 5.8 million workers, half of the nation’s total workforce, who are hired on a temporary, part-time basis.

Large businesses call for deregulation and labor market flexibility for further growth. No other government in the world achieved this better than the Lee Myung-bak administration, but jobs added by the chaebol were miniscule, as they were bent on outsourcing and off-shoring jobs under the pretext of the “unfavorable” or “chaebol-bashing” environment here.

This shows the direction the next government should take.

It should seek job creation through promoting service industries run by smaller, more creative businesses, while increasing public sector jobs such as teachers, public health employees and other social workers, in far greater numbers. It also ought to offer more help, in finance and tax breaks, to both employers who train their workers, and college graduates willing to start at smaller firms.

This is the time for candidates to provide specific policies, and not become mired in endless whitewashing of history or unifying of candidacies. <The Korea Times>

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