Moon Jae-in Urges All-out Efforts To Turn Tide Of 'disastrous' Youth Unemployment

President Moon Jae-in on Thursday called for all-out efforts to create new, quality jobs for young people, calling it a serious and growing problem that requires swift and extraordinary measures.

SEOUL, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 15th Mar, 2018 ) :President Moon Jae-in on Thursday called for all-out efforts to create new, quality jobs for young people, calling it a serious and growing problem that requires swift and extraordinary measures.

"I have stressed the need to take extraordinary steps for youth employment whenever there has been a chance to do so since last year's presidential election. But I believe things still have not improved that much," the president said in a special meeting at his office Cheong Wa Dae to discuss government measures against the high youth unemployment rate, which has remained in the 9 percent range or above since Moon took office in May 2017.

"I hope the measures to be announced by the government today will be those extraordinary steps that will resolve the issue of the youth jobless rate," he said at the meeting attended by some 90 top government officials, including 18 ministers.

The jobless rate of people aged between 15 and 29 years came to 9.8 percent at the end of last month, a significant reduction from the 12.3 percent tallied a year earlier. Still, the youth unemployment rate was more than twice as high as the overall jobless rate of 4.6 percent for the same month.

Moon insisted that the youth jobless rate, if left untouched, could create a national disaster that may very well threaten the country's growth, if not survival. "The youth unemployment issue is the source of all the pain and suffering that our young people face.

We cannot but address the youth unemployment issue before any others for the sustainability of our society," the president said, according to Cheong Wa Dae pool reports. The president noted that poor pay and working conditions at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often blamed as a reason for the high youth unemployment rate while SMEs continue to suffer from a chronic shortage of workers.

As former leaders did before, Moon stressed the need to eradicate the apparent mismatch by encouraging more young people to work at SMEs. But unlike many before him, the president called for efforts to narrow the wage gap between large and small businesses.

"Today, all government measures are gathered here. The first is that the government will utilize all its policy measures to narrow the actual income gap between workers at small and medium-sized firms and large companies," he said.

"The second is to unprecedentedly expand (government) support for small and medium-sized firms to give them more power (and resources) to increase their new jobs." Such measures must lead to the creation of quality jobs and not just short-term jobs designed to make the government look good on paper, the president said.

He also urged parliament to help the government's efforts, citing the need for additional spending. "To reverse the disaster-like youth unemployment situation, we need financial measures. We believe such financial measures require a supplementary budget for jobs," he told the meeting.

Moon also called for increased efforts to root out job-related corruption. Earlier, Moon instructed his government to take swift and thorough measures to punish those found to have secured government jobs through illicit means.

Cheong Wa Dae said the government will soon take steps to lay off all government employees found to have landed their jobs through such means, including 226 workers at Kangwon Land casino who were exposed in a recently concluded government probe.