Work, work, work, work, work, seh we put in work! More Jamaicans are employed now than ever before.

Jamaica’s unemployment rate recently fell to a historic low of 4.5%. This is massively impressive, especially coming out of COVID-19 and means good news for Jamaica’s economy.

The  Statistical Institute of Jamaica announced the findings of the April 2023 Labour Force Survey, recently.

The new unemployment rate was one and a half percentage points lower than the previous record of 6% that was set last year.

According to STATIN, as of April 2023, there were 1,373,800 people in the labour force.  That’s up 1.7% from April last year.

And for context, Jamaica’s population as of 2021 was 2.8 million, which includes children, who are not of working age and retirees.

STATIN said that the lower unemployment rate was mostly because more women joined the labour force.

The agency said of the 1.3 million people in the labour force, around 68% were females, however, the female unemployment rate is still higher than the men’s. 

So, even though more women are working than men, there are still more unemployed women than there are unemployed men.

So what industries are driving this growth? Any guesses?  If you guessed BPOs… you’re right!

STATIN said that the industry group ‘Real Estate and Other Business Services’ which includes the fast-growing BPOs sector, was among the top two industries hiring females. The other was ‘service workers and shop and market sales Workers’. 

The fact that they single out BPOs is pretty interesting to me because nearshoring is something that Senator Aubyn Hill, the Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce, has been talking about since he got the ministry. 

Nearshoring is when large companies, especially in North America and Europe outsource their operations to other countries that are nearby. 

And it’s one of the areas the Minister said his ministry would be pushing to help grow Jamaica’s economy. So, to see it highlighted here means the strategy may be working.

Plus I don’t know if you’ve seen the BPO complex that’s being built in Portmore. They are three massive buildings totalling 240,000 square feet of office space for BPO companies. So far, two of the three buildings are finished.  They’re expected to bring thousands of new BPO jobs.

And that’s the bottom line.