31 Pct. of young Cuban workers employed in private sector

31 Pct. of young Cuban workers employed in private sector
Published September 06, 2015 EFE

Thirty-one percent of the young people employed in Cuba, more than 1.5
million people, worked in the private sector and the rest were in jobs
in the state-run sector at the close of 2014, according to official
figures published Sunday by local media.

The head of employment in the Labor and Social Security Ministry, or
MTSS, Jesus Otamendiz, said in an interview published in the Juventud
Rebelde newspaper that "there are a considerable number of young people
in the new forms of management," as the autonomous or private sector is
called on the communist island.

Of the 504,613 people registered as working for themselves or
autonomously at the end of May 2015, 166,605 were young people,
representing 31 percent of the people who had selected that form of
employment, he said.

In addition, Otamendiz said that at the end of 2014, 4.97 million people
were employed in Cuba and just under 1.53 million of them were young
people, representing 31 percent of the labor force.

The MTSS chief also said that "the majority" of young people are still
employed in the state-run sector, although they are increasingly moving
into the private sector.

He said that 60 percent of the total number of young people working "for
themselves" live in the provinces of Havana, Matanzas, Villa Clara,
Camagüey, Holguin and Santiago de Cuba, and they are employed mainly in
activities such as food preparation and sales, cargo and passenger
transport.

The broadening of the private sector is one of the main reforms
undertaken in recent years by the government of Raul Castro to "update"
Cuba's socialist economic model and compensate for the gradual
suppression of some 500,000 state-sponsored jobs between 2011 and 2015.

In the interview, the MTSS chief discussed the challenge posed by youth
employment in a country experiencing a "flexibilization of the labor
market amid a changing and more complex economic environment," which is
increasingly burdened by the aging of the island's population.

"It's about achieving the efficient insertion of youth into the labor
force, including the possibilities of employment in the non-state sector
of the economy," he said. EFE

Source: 31 Pct. of young Cuban workers employed in private sector | Fox
News Latino -
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2015/09/06/31-pct-young-cuban-workers-employed-in-private-sector/