The peculiar contradictions of Tunisia’s job market

More than 750,000 Tunisians are officially counted as unemployed while many key economic sectors suffer a workforce shortage that push more investors to rely on workers from sub-Saharan Africa, writes Mourad Teyeb, Tunisian journalist and consultant.

Tunis, Tunisia - Mohamed, manager and co-owner of a pizzeria in Lafayette, a crowded upper-class Tunis neighborhood, was so busy helping with the big number of lunch-time customers that he hardly found a couple of minutes to talk.

“I see that you are serving sandwiches when I expected that your job is welcoming customers and supervising your workers. Why is that?”, I asked.

“Because we cannot find workers”, he replied without even looking at me.

Surprised, I asked: “how can you lack workers while thousands of young people are dearly looking for jobs? Why don’t you hire workers?”.

“Do you really believe it?” he asked, bitterly smiling. “We have done everything to attract workers. We pay them very well; they don’t have to work more than the legal 8 hours a day and they have a weekly day off”.

Mohamed’s “very good pay” means 50 Tunisian Dinars (about $18) per day, double the average offered to workers by similar businesses.

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“If you are lucky to find trustworthy workers, they are too lazy and often ask for more than one pause during work time”.

What Mohamed’s business is complaining about, labor shortage, is a strange situation. But not surprising today in Tunisia.

A big number of small businesses strive to convince young people to accept hundreds of vacancies in restaurants, in cafés, in construction and related services, in transport, in agriculture…

A strange phenomenon that started in Tunisia around 2014 and is getting worse every day.

Official government data show that overall unemployment rate in Tunisia was 17.8% in the first quarter of 2021. Unemployment rate among higher education graduates exceeds 30%.

But how much do these figures reflect reality?

Why young Tunisians refuse to work

Youth between 15 and 29 years of age represent 28.4 % of the 12-million population of Tunisia.

Yet, at every olive oil, grain, palm dates, oranges or other harvest seasons, farmers and brokers make a lot of efforts to hire workers and often multiply daily salaries. Often in vain. Workers are nearly impossible to find. More farmers stop trying and leave their crops unharvested.

In recent years, we can often hear potential job-seekers slam a sad reality: “you don’t have to be educated, cultivated, serious, honest… to succeed in Tunisia”, sighs Iheb, a 22-year-old Management student.

“Look at corrupt politicians and MPs, bad football players, corrupt journalists and show-biz stars…These are the idols of the young Tunisians”.

Irregular migration to Europe has also become a culture in Tunisian society. And not only among the needy. Middle class and even well-off people, too, regularly risk their lives to reach Europe.

Whole families sailing together has become a common practice.

Families can sacrifice everything to provide their children with the money needed for a journey: mothers sell their jewelry; fathers sell parcels of land or a car…

Today, Tunisians between 15 and 29 represent 62 % of all migrants, with 86% of men and 14 % of women.

“One of our friends illegally sailed to Italy at one coronavirus lockdown night. Eight months later, he arrived back to our village driving a fantastic Mercedes and bought a large parcel of land in a near-by upper-class neighborhood”, says Nizar, a 28-year-old unemployed man who left his home town Kasserine, near the Algerian borders, to look for a job in the capital Tunis. “I need to work all my life to afford only one wheel of that Mercedes”, he sighed.

Many young Tunisians consider physical work, such as in agriculture and construction, “degrading and indecent”, says Iheb.

“University graduates prefer waiting for years until they find what they consider ‘a decent job’, which often means well-paid, comfortable, public-service office work”, he explains.

Cafés around Tunisia are packed with young people, from day to night, idly connecting to free Internet and betting on any football match played on earth.

Before and after it was legalized in Tunisia, sports betting has also become a main source of revenue for many Tunisians.

In 2019, Tunisian parliament voted to legalize the activity and the opening of dedicated shops.

“For a country extremely suffering from the absence of foreign currency revenues, allowing people to gamble online, using dollars or users is a big mistake”, says Adel Samaali, an economist.

He warned that “even when Tunisian Dinar is used in betting, draining billions in a country whose economy is suffering at all levels is sad.

Gambling has turned Tunisians lazier and more passive persons. Nobody ever gives importance to the virtues of work and production and nobody cares whether somebody’s fortune is halal or not”.

“All what today’s young generation want is to get rich, as quickly and easily as possible”, says Hassan, a café owner. “Patience and sacrifice mean nothing to them”.

On the other hand, the informal sector is very successful in Tunisia and it has always lured young job-seekers, mainly in the border towns with Libya and Algeria.

“Smuggling and contra-band offer easy money and in a short time”, explains Dr. Kamal Laroussi, an anthropologist.

Even the risk of illegally crossing the borders to carry illegal goods is not big as the smuggling magnates often have good ties with border guards and customs officers.

“Young people prefer smuggling because they can earn in one day what government employees, teachers or private-sector workers earn in months”, adds Laroussi.

Many have family members living and working in Europe or the Gulf countries. They regularly receive from them amounts of money in Euros or in Dollars. With the low value the Tunisian dinar, these amounts are often considerable enough to make these young, officially unemployed, have a comfortable life while doing nothing.

Can we call these types of youth job-seekers and include them in the official economic statistics?

“It’s impossible to minutely define unemployment rates because various factors intervene to increase or decrease them”, thinks Adel Samaali.

Samaali, a career banker cites three of these factors:

- a big number of young Tunisians are officially registered as unemployed but they do, in reality, work such as taxi-drivers, street vendors, smugglers etc.

- many post-graduate students enroll in the government’s employment offices before even finishing their studies so that they have priority when they leave universities

- children of wealthy families have a lot of money and they, still, register as job-seekers.

Africans are a solution

Many businesses in Tunisia have turned to African migrants in Tunisia to remedy this rising need for workers.

“We seriously think of hiring Africans to fulfill our needs in workers as our activity started to recover following the Covid19 two-year crisis”, Hassan vows.

Sub-Saharan Africans, refugees and migrants, are today everywhere in Tunisia, even in towns and villages far from the traditional host locations in the country’s south-east region and eastern coast.

“Although they are paid exactly like Tunisians, entrepreneurs and business owners like to hire Africans because they serious and able to work for long hours”, explains Iheb, who is also a civil society activist in the tourist island Djerba.

Despite a crisis that goes on for a decade now in this resort south-east of Tunisia, Djerba started to attract Africans in big numbers since 2019. According to Iheb, there are about 300 Africans in Djerba today, mainly from Côte d’Ivoire. They work in construction, fishing, house guarding, agriculture etc.

Although the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers in Tunisia vary from one source to another: government, UN agencies, civil society organizations..., but there are certainly tens of thousands of them, mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Most of them are in an irregular situation and many arrived to work and stay, not to continue their way to Europe.

There’s an international pressure on Tunisia to acknowledge some of the African migrants’ rights such as legal work and access to health care and to implement the Mobility Partnership agreement Tunisia signed with the European Union in March 2014.

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