The Department of Labour (DoL) has been working to introduce the job shop concept in the country in an attempt to help create more employment opportunities. Job shops are expected to help create 500,000 direct jobs and 5 million indirect jobs, according to the department which has been doing home work to implement the concept at the earliest.

DoL officials said the department would introduce a set of parameters based on which any individual, organization or firm can set up a job shop in any place across the country. Conceptually, the job shop will be a mediating point between job seekers and those who need to get their work done.

“Such shops will not offer permanent jobs as different offices and organizations do,” said Krishna Hari Puskar who recently assumed the post of director general at the DoL. “They will be limited to providing jobs for a short period of time.”

According to him, the department will provide details of unemployed youths from across the country to such offices, and the offices will choose the kind of person they require as per the nature of the work to be done. “The offices will call one from among the many unemployed youths while receiving orders for manpower for a particular kind of work and a specific period of time,” he stated.

At present, it has been difficult for anyone to find appropriate persons for getting some specific work done. “For example, an individual or a firm might need some people to shift an office from one place to another,” said Puskar to illustrate the concept. “During such a condition, the individual or firm could ask the job shop to manage people to do the work for a temporary period.”

As per the rough criteria developed by the department for potential operators of such job shops, any individual, group of individuals or firms can establish such shops. The shop should be registered with the Department of Industry and has to deposit Rs 200,000 at the DoL as a security deposit.

“Such shops will collect cash from the one whose work is done and then pay the individual who performs the work,” said an official at the department. “The shop can charge only 2-5 percent of the wages collected from the service seekers for its intermediary role, and has to pay the rest of the money to the one who did the job.

“The payment should be made only through banking channels, and if the shop does not pay the hired persons, the salary will come out of the security deposit,” added the official. He added that the remuneration to be paid by the shops to their staff should not be less than the government-set minimum rate.

Officials said that permitting transactions to be done only through banking channels will lessen chances of fraud on the part of job shops while it will also contribute to increasing tax collection. The DoL has also requested several foreign non-governmental organizations for technical support to implement the plan. “Such job shops are simple to establish. They will not be a burden to the government because they require no budget,” added Puskar. “Rather it will help to control the growing unemployment rate and increase the people’s participation in the government’s tax base,” added Puskar.

The DoL, which has almost finalized the proposal of the programme, said it would submit the proposal to the Ministry of Labour and Employment within a week.

According to government statistics, around 500,000 individuals enter the job market annually in Nepal. However, due to lack of direct or indirect jobs at home, a majority of them are forced to seek foreign employment despite the difficulties it entails.

Published on: 9 May 2013 | The Kathmandu Post