‘Job opportunities for the youth’: Competing and overlapping discourses on youth unemployment and work informality in Egypt

Introduction

Employment informality, or employment without access to work contracts and social insurance, is highly prevalent in Egypt. ¹ Recent entrants to the labor market from youth are particularly disadvantaged, with only 14.8% of this group having access to contributory social insurance schemes (Assaad, 2010). ² While informality is strongly associated with lower education, more educated youth in Egypt are also faced with informality (Gatti et al., 2011). Analysis of recent survey data in Egypt shows that only 53.4% of educated working youth (those with at least an intermediate education) have access to social insurance (Barsoum, 2015). This level of access renders extending social security coverage to workers within informality a key policy challenge in Egypt. It is also a relatively recent challenge. The educated in Egypt have been historically sheltered from informality thanks to the legacy of a policy of guaranteed employment in the public service, initiated in the 1960s. With the withdrawal of this guarantee, informality has become an everyday reality for educated youth. This group is a key political force in Egypt (e.g. Ibrahim, 1980). The role of educated youth in mobilizing demonstrations in the country’s momentous uprising of 2011 through social media attests to their importance on the political agenda (Ibrahim, 2011; Korany, 2014).

Despite the gravity of work informality in Egypt and its prevalence even among the politically key group of educated youth, informality remains little discussed as a youth policy issue. This remains the case, while the issue of youth unemployment and the need to create jobs for the youth receive heightened focus in the policy discourse, as explored below. These discursive acts are associated with the revival of the process of hiring educated youth in the government/public sector particularly after the uprising. ³ Drawing on Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What is the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, this article seeks to elucidate the assumptions implicit in this policy approach to informality and youth unemployment in Egypt. The policy analysis seeks to investigate the contradiction in the omission of the issue of employment informality, despite its prevalence among educated youth. The article critically juxtaposes the policy discourse on informality to that of youth interviewed as part of this study.

The research presented in this article is important in several ways. First, it seeks to challenge the limitations of the discourse on youth employment issues in Egypt and the Arab region in general. This discourse has been long fixated on percentages of unemployment as the only measure of young people’s economic integration. This focus is misplaced in many ways. It is not necessary to downplay the high rate of youth unemployment in Egypt to argue that those trapped in jobs without social security or work stability constitute a much more sizable group. Unemployment eventually ends. Bad jobs that provide compromised benefits and no social protection, on the other hand, are traps of poverty and precariousness. Second, a discussion of work informality and access to social security is central to understanding Egypt’s recent, momentous political changes. Educated youth, such as those interviewed as part of this study, have a deep sense of injustice as they describe their employment precariousness. It is young people similar to those interviewed as part of this study who have been at the forefront of recent events in Egypt. A disgruntled educated middle class has been identified as key to the understanding of social movements in the Arab region (Assaad, 2014; Ibrahim, 2011; Korany, 2014; Moghadam, 2013). The argument in this article is not to suggest a direct causal relationship between work informality and the political insurgency that has been dubbed in the media as the ‘Arab Spring’. However, it provides a reading of one of the most incendiary issues in the country, namely job insecurity and employment informality. Third, the article seeks to humanize work informality by showing how these young people strategize their options. Behind the statistics on young people in informal jobs, there are life opportunities that are constrained by lack of income security and job stability.

This article is organized as follows. The following section provides a theoretical reading of policy representation and employment informality. This is followed by a background section on the status of youth employment in Egypt. After a note on methodology, the policy setting and discourse on informality are presented, followed by a discussion on the views of young people about their employment options and strategies. The article concludes with a discussion on the relevance of the WPR to the discursive representations of informality and youth unemployment in Egypt.

Problem representations and informality

Carol Bacchi’s WPR approach has made a key contribution to critical policy studies. Bacchi (2009) is credited with highlighting the limitations of rationalist policy analysis approaches that seek to ‘solve’ problems without stopping to examine how these problems are constructed in the first place. The WPR approach inspires a movement for policy analysis that shifts the focus from this technical and seemingly neutral exercise to the political and social construction of issues (Bacchi, 2009). Bacchi offered WPR as a methodology that aims to elicit unexplored assumptions in policy design and responses (Payne, 2014). It provides a mode for critical policy analysis that enables a rigorous appraisal and reappraisal of policy agendas, and an elucidation of the particularities and assumptions inherent in a policy design (Bletsas and Beasley, 2012). The WPR approach has been largely adopted to study the gendered nature of policies (see e.g. Goodwin, 2012; Marshall, 2012; Payne, 2014). However, it has been extended to other policy domains as a means to explore governance and governmentality (Bletsas and Beasley, 2012). Relevant to the analysis and the discussion of data in this article, the WPR approach helps address positivist claims of data neutrality, allowing for a reading of the politics of report writing and dissemination (Bletsas and Beasley, 2012).

Informality is primarily a political and rhetorical process (Saitta, 2013). The term ‘informal sector’ is a reification of a condition traditional societies have always lived. When an interdisciplinary mission by the International Labor Organization (ILO) wanted to describe persisting traditional forms of undocumented economic activities in Kenya, they opted for the term ‘informal sector’ (Hart, 1973; ILO, 1972). The informal sector was conceptualized as an ephemeral stage, bound to end or at least to decline to insignificance with the advent of modernity (Chen, 2005). We now know that this was not the case, with informality reaching a large plurality of the global workforce,1.3 billion workers out of 3 billion, according to Jütting and Laiglesia’s (2009) estimate. The blurring of boundaries between the formal and the informal prompted the ILO (2002) to emphasize the notion of an informal ‘economy’ as opposed to an informal ‘sector’, shifting the attention from enterprise-related characteristics to work relations. The ILO defines the informal economy as ‘all economic activities by workers and economic units that are – in law or in practice – not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements’ (2002: 25). In Foucauldian terms, informality pertains to economic activities that escape the ‘gaze’ of the state (Foucault, 1977).

The research on informality has long been polarized between two key lines of argument. The voluntarist and legalist argument conceptualized informality as a choice to avoid paying taxes and other cumbersome costs associated with formality (e.g. De Soto, 1989; Maloney, 2004; Van Ginneken, 2003). Among wage workers within informality, Van Ginneken (2003: 66) argues that they are ‘not able or willing to contribute a relatively high percentage of their incomes to finance social security benefits that do not meet their priority needs’ (emphasis added). The structuralist argument, on the other hand, sees informality as an exploitative mechanism that is inherent to capitalist economies and the globalized forces of deregulated capitalism (e.g. Castells and Portes, 1989; Sassen, 1996; Slavnic, 2010; Standing, 2011). Despite the simplicity of this polarized representation of informality, which Williams and Nadin (2012) read along the lines of the structure/agency dichotomy, it continues to inform the policy and research discourse on informality.

For policy makers, the perennial challenge of informality is systematically connected to tax evasion, voluntary non-contribution to social insurance schemes, and even illegality. The informal is readily demonized or, at best, blamed for contributing to its own marginalization. Ilahiane and Sherry (2008) note that informal workers in Morocco are routinely mythologized as ‘pimps, drug dealers, counterfeiters and pirates’. Similarly, Saitta (2013) cites New York’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy against street vending as the epitome of governments’ struggle against informality. Within these policy representations, there is little space allowed for the discussion of the precariousness facing workers within informality and their employment rights. Policy agendas for market competitiveness and labor market flexibility further contribute to this omission (Standing, 2011). This is particularly the case in contexts where there is limited fiscal space for a comprehensive social protection floor that would include informal workers. In these contexts, labor market risks are shouldered by informal workers and their families (ILO, 2012). Building effective social protection floors has been a challenge particularly highlighted in most Arab counties (ILO, 2009).

Benería and Floro (2005) note the social tension of job insecurity and informality within a global climate that emphasizes political rights and democracy. This has also led to contradictory analyses of the political volatility of the informal. In one analysis, the informal are ‘docile bodies’, in the Foucauldian sense, having to abide with the rules of their employers’ conditionalities and to adapt to precariousness (Standing, 2011: 142). In another, the informal can be a politically ‘dangerous’ group that is intolerant, frustrated, detached from affluence and seeing no future of security or identity (Standing, 2011: 128). Assaad (2014) offers a labor-market-based explanation of the Arab Spring, connecting it to what he terms the destabilizing of an ‘authoritarian bargain’ social contract. Arab regimes, he argues, have sustained a deep and persistent labor market dualism where the public sector pays higher compensations (including non-pecuniary compensation) for certain eligible groups, primarily among the educated. These groups are then obliged to wait in line for these rationed jobs, thus transforming labor markets into a tool of political appeasement (Assaad, 2014). In this analysis, the Arab Spring is connected to the destabilizing of this social contract, due to the implementation of structural adjustment policies and the relinquishing of public sector hiring due to the fiscal burden of these policies (Assaad, 2014).

Munck (2013: 759) is particularly critical of the discourse of the ‘danger’ of informality, which he argues supports politics of social pathology. For informal workers, informality is an everyday lived experience of uncertainties and contradictory realities. As social agents, those affected by employment informality strategize their options. The complexity of their experience of informality defies simple generalizations. Despite the ‘Arab Spring’, and despite the discontent shown in the interview data, educated informal workers rationally strategize their options. As demonstrated by the interview data presented later in the article, a key strategy for educated youth in Egypt has been to seek employment in public service for its stability and other benefits. For this group in particular, informality challenges some of the long-held privileges associated with education in countries in the South, where education would provide the vehicle to ‘modern’ jobs that were secure and stable (see Dore [1977] for an extended discussion of this issue). Both the youth’s active seeking of jobs in the public service and the corresponding government policy decision to make these jobs available at the time of the uprising are tactical responses to the dilemma facing this region due to the legacy of guaranteed employment, and the deterioration of employment conditions in the private sector.

Background: Educated youth employment issues in Egypt

The ‘generation of structural adjustment’, as Elyachar (2005) notes, was confronted with a situation of high unemployment and prevalent employment informality. This generation has also been the largest in the country’s history due to population growth (Assaad and Barsoum, 2009). High youth unemployment rates, reaching 15.7% according to a recent ILO report (Barsoum et al., 2014), are therefore a key marker of Egypt’s labor market. Unemployment in Egypt is primarily a problem of labor market insertion, affecting fresh graduates (Assaad and Krafft, 2013). The unemployed are predominately from the young and the educated (Assaad and Krafft, 2013). The burden of unemployment in Egypt is particularly shouldered by young women. Their unemployment rate is more than five times that of young men, reaching 38.1% compared to 6.8% among male youth (Barsoum et al., 2014).

Unemployment statistics, however, provide a myopic view of the situation of youth in Egypt’s labor market. By definition, the unemployed are those not working for at least one hour in the research reference week and actively searching for a job. ⁴ Two large groups cannot be included in these unemployment statistics but are of great relevance. The first group consists of young people who have given up searching for a job. This group, often termed the ‘discouraged’, is significant and is particularly high in rural areas. Assaad (2010) shows that the joblessness rate among youth aged between 15 and 29 reaches 60%. The second group, more related to the focus of this article, includes workers within the informal economy. As noted earlier, only 14.8% of this group have access to contributory social insurance schemes or health insurance (Assaad, 2010). Among working educated youth, only 53.4% have access to social security (Barsoum, 2015).

A note on study methodology

This article relies on in-depth loosely structured interviews and the analysis of official documents and policy statements. Sampling for these two data collection processes has been purposeful and theoretically informed (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Silverman, 2000). Qualitative research seeks to acquire in-depth and intimate information about a smaller group of persons as opposed to large, randomly selected or nationally representative samples used for quantitative research (Ambert et al., 1995). As such, it is the phenomenon under investigation that guides the research sampling design, rather than issues of subject representativeness (Ambert et al., 1995).

Interviews were conducted with two main groups between 2012 and 2014. Young educated youth with some work experience constitute the first group. Twenty-two young men and women were interviewed during this period. Finding educated youth employed informally was not a difficult task given the prevalence of the phenomenon, as the data in the previous section show. Interviews with youth followed the life history approach, deliberately designed to be an informal chat about their work experience and views about their work and employment options. The second group of informants were persons working with policy makers and providers of data. The analysis relies on discussions with staff members of Egypt’s central statistical bureau, CAPMAS, ⁵ and a number of international and donor organizations operating in Cairo. In accordance with ethical considerations in qualitative research, all data identifying informants are withheld from the analysis and pseudonyms are used in attributing interview data.

The article also relies on a desk review of legal and policy documents and statements. These include official labor statistical reports, social insurance legislation, press releases by governmental bodies and policy statements on youth employment issues in different media channels. The last mentioned were reached through a systematic search of policy statements in media websites using common and advanced search engines within key media outlets, with particular focus on quasi-official newspaper websites. The search focused on news items and statements during the period from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2014, which was a particularly eventful period in Egypt due to the uprising of January 2011. The criteria for inclusion were the reference to a policy statement by a high-ranking official (primarily a minister of state or a governor) on youth employment issues. The search yielded 300 news items that were grouped and categorized by focus. Both interview data and reviewed documents were in Arabic and were translated by the author.

Policy representations of youth employment issues: Official reports, existing policies and policy statements

Perceptions of educated youth on informality and employment opportunities

Educated youth mirror the policy discourse in a way that reflects their status as being suspended between a formal, privileged status and an informal, subaltern status. They consider informality as demeaning and below them. This is similar to the state discourse that classifies informality as a problem for the poor and uneducated. Educated youth are also most attentive to the discourse on the creation of jobs for the educated in the civil service. Conscious of the disparity in benefits between private sector and civil service jobs, there is a highly pronounced valorization of the latter. When these jobs are not attainable, young people speak about injustice and unfulfilled entitlements. This section draws on interviews with educated youth to explore each of these phenomena. ⁸

At the time of the interview, Ashraf was 28 years old, not married, and as is common among Egyptian youth, living with his family in the middle-class Cairo neighborhood of Shubra. He had a university degree in sociology and was working in a private school as a seasonal teacher. Ashraf noted that, upon graduation, his first job search method was to visit governmental offices seeking employment as a social worker. When these efforts proved in vain, he accepted work in a shop in his neighborhood. This first employment experience lasted for only two months, to be followed by four other experiences working in other shops. His mother, a retired teacher, helped him find his current job as a seasonal teacher, but he is far from satisfied with this post, citing the low pay as a key factor. He also notes that this job provides no social security and is not based on a written work contract. Finding a post in the government remains Ashraf’s preferred outcome:

Work in the government has insurance and old-age pension. There is also health insurance, paid leave and holidays. There is also job security. No one can fire me at any point because there is a law. But in the private sector when they don’t insure you, they can fire you at any point, even if you’ve been working there for 20 years … (Ashraf, February 2013)

The benefits Ashraf lists in a public sector job stem from what he misses in his current job. His list starts with social insurance and an old-age pension but extends to other benefits that he also lacks in his current job, which he represents as a lawless domain. Despite his young age, single status and good health, he highlights his lack of access to health insurance. There is a clear generational dimension to the valorization of jobs in the government. Ashraf’s mother, the retired teacher, has a pension and health care benefits.

The same generational divide also emerges clearly from Mostafa’s narrative. At the time of the interview, he was unemployed, having left a private sector company following transfer to a work site on Cairo’s periphery, increasing his transportation costs beyond what his meager salary could cover. Mostafa highlights the generational dimension of government work valorization, and, referring to his father’s post in government, notes his plan to seek his help to get a government position:

I am thinking that I should find a job in a public sector company. I am convinced of this. They will give me insurance. … My father worked in a public sector company and he had early retirement. I talked to him to see [if there was] anyone he knows in the company [who could] get me a job. (Mostafa, November 2012)

Indicatively, Mostafa chose unemployment over staying in an informal job. Resonating with the policy focus on hiring the unemployed in public service, Mostafa sees a government job as the remedy to his unstable employment trajectory. He would not want to search for another private sector job. The job search method that Mostafa highlights is through ‘anyone he (his father) knows’, a clear example of the power of contacts and nepotism.

Interviewed youth talk of nepotism and favoritism in government hiring, not in abstract terms, but narrated at the personal level. Amr, aged 29 at the time of the interview, is not married and also lives with his mother (his father passed away). They live in the low-income neighborhood of Ain Shams in Cairo. He has a university degree in accounting. At the time of the interview in 2013, he was in his sixth job since graduation in 2006, with intervening spells of unemployment. None of his six jobs provided social insurance to him or to any of his co-workers. His occupations varied from salesperson and shop assistant to accountant. He noted that if he gets a stable government job, he will be able to start a family and get married. Asked whether he had tried to find such a job, he notes:

I have applied to many government places … the answer was there were no jobs. But it is all contacts, ‘wasta’. It is all about who you know. Those who don’t have contacts better not apply. I never heard of anyone who got hired in the government or in a [publicly owned] bank through their own efforts. (Amr, February 2013)

When asked if he knew someone who had been hired through contacts, he answered:

Yes. His [his friend’s] father was working in the same bank. I was surprised because his grade was ‘pass’ [that is, he had a C average]. This means it is all about who you know. (Amr, February 2013)

In Amr’s view, his friend was not qualified to get this prized job due to his low graduation grade, but it was the authority of his father that got him the job. The ‘children of employees’ is actually a notorious phrase in Egypt.

Notions of injustice and perceptions of favoritism peppered the discourse of the interviewed youth. Despite the stalling of the guaranteed employment scheme, the young people interviewed continue to view a government job as an entitlement. For instance, Manar, a young journalism graduate, readily connects the unavailability of jobs in the government to social injustice. She notes:

I was educated and I worked hard to get a degree. … The government has to provide a job for me. … There should be no favoritism. … Favoritism should be eliminated so that there is social justice … (Manar, February 2013)

Manar’s father and mother were both low-level government employees. She noted that she had hoped to get a teaching job at her university upon graduation given her high GPA. ⁹ This never materialized because, she noted, many other graduates were eying the same job and the university did not need more teaching assistants. When the teaching job was confirmed as unavailable, she took jobs in a succession of private sector companies, never staying more than six months in any job. Her occupations included sales person and graphic designer.

In the following quote, Ashraf seems resigned to the fact that government jobs, with all their benefits, cannot be reached because of favoritism. He notes:

These jobs [government jobs] are reserved for certain people. They get the jobs without anybody knowing [vacancies not announced]. No advertising, no exams, not anything. I cannot get these jobs because I have no connections (‘wasta’) or because I am not one of the ‘children of employees’. (Ashraf, February 2013)

Ashraf calls attention to the systemic barriers to finding government jobs without connections. These barriers are also central to the policy discourse on youth hiring in the public service, with emphasis on announcing jobs as a sign of transparency.

The interview data highlight the overlapping discourses of the state and educated youth. The two discourses overlap in appreciating the role of the government in creating jobs in the civil service. Young people’s valorization of jobs in the government is a reflection of decades of state policies that favored the educated with jobs in this sector of job stability, income security and benefits. The discourse of educated youth within informality reflects their status as a group suspended between the formal privileged status of the earlier generation of the educated and the informal subaltern. To this group, there is a perception of a denied ‘entitlement’ to a stable job. They echo the state on the urgency of creating jobs for the youth in the civil service.

The two discourses also overlap in shunning informality as a policy issue that can and should be carefully addressed. Indicatively, these interviewed youth seek the panacea of a public service job, with no discussion of ways to fix their current working conditions or seeking measures to improve their access to benefits. Informality is perceived as a misfortune that can best be overcome by finding a job in the civil service.

The discourse of the educated, however, is in discordance with the state on whether the absence of government jobs constitutes a social injustice issue. In the discourse of the state, youth unemployment is a problem of great magnitude and the efforts to create jobs in the civil service are announced as a sign of addressing the grievances of youth. These efforts are not, however, appreciated by those who do not obtain these prized jobs.

Concluding remarks

Using Bacchi’s WPR approach, this article presents a critical analysis of the policy discourse on informality and youth unemployment in Egypt. Bacchi’s focus on problem construction challenges depictions of policy processes as rational, balanced, objective and orderly (Goodwin, 2012). The policy focus on unemployment and the objective of creating jobs for the unemployed correspond with established class-biased arrangements, where the educated are to be sheltered from job precariousness. This same rationale is repeated in the discourse of the educated, who face the realities of job informality and continue to demand the panacea of public sector hiring. The growing presence of educated youth within informality disrupts this arrangement. The increasing democratization of higher education and the inability of the public service to absorb cohorts of graduates contribute to this disruption. The state dilemma is that while it managed to increase access to higher education, its economy could not provide job opportunities within the formal sector that match the expectations of the educated (Assaad, 2014). The dilemma facing educated youth, on the other hand, is in being suspended between a desired formal privileged status and an actual informal subaltern status. They seek to claim their historical class entitlement as an educated group. The discourse of the state about its efforts to combat unemployment and to create jobs for the youth provide support and nourishment to these claims of entitlement.

Bacchi’s approach of looking at issues left unproblematized in the representation is central to understanding this bias. Informality is marginalized for being a problem affecting the disenfranchised, the rural and the uneducated. In the state discourse, informality is an issue of illegality and tax evasion that should be met with stringent regulatory policies. The policy discourse on informality fails to acknowledge the contradiction between the importance placed on educated youth as a political force closely linked to the country’s recent momentous events and the failure to address the informality that they confront. A similarly unproblematized contradiction pertains to the gendered aspect of youth unemployment in Egypt. Despite the much larger numbers of women among the unemployed, their issues remain sidelined in the policy discourse. The masses of unemployed women are included in the total figures of the unemployed to, paradoxically, support a policy agenda for male unemployed youth. Implicit in this gender bias is a reckoning of the political volatility of educated male youth.

Educated Egyptian youth have now joined their less educated peers in being forced to accept the insecure income and employment vulnerability of informality. Their demands, however, echo the state discourse that the ‘solution’ is to hire youth into the civil service. Civil service jobs offer the only escape from informality that they can perceive, unavailable though this panacea remains in reality. As they echo the discourse of the state in valorizing civil service jobs, it becomes even more difficult for the state to address the demands of this group. Unlike the government policy makers who cannot evade the realities of budget deficits or find resources to accommodate the vastly expanded pool of young graduates, the educated youth see the government’s failure to hire them as a breach of faith and a personal injustice.