2026 May Day celebration: TUC warns rising youth unemployment threatens national security

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]The over 500,000 young people that recently applied for recruitment into the security services highlight the magnitude of the employment problem we have on hands.

[00:00:14]The Ghana Statistical Service estimated overall unemployment rate of 13%.

[00:00:21]Youth unemployment is a staggering 34% and the data further shows that for people in employment nearly 80% are informally employed.

[00:00:32]Your Excellency, the employment challenge is both colossal and difficult.

[00:00:37]The challenge is not only unemployment, it is also that many of those in work remain insecure, underpaid, and insufficiently protected.

[00:00:48]They work full time yet struggle to afford food, rent, transport, health care, utilities, and education.

[00:00:58]Your Excellency, having a large pool of educated young people roaming the streets and sitting idle entails substantial waste of human resources.

[00:01:07]These young educated Ghanaians are denied the opportunity to realize their potential and contribute to nation building.

[00:01:16]Our society is not reaping the much talked about dividends of the youth bulge.

[00:01:23]Quite the opposite, educated, jobless, and frustrated youth has become a ticking time bomb. Mr. President, when we work together, as we must, we can ensure that this time bomb does not explode and that Ghana can reap the full benefits of growing an educated young population.

[00:01:47]The failure of our economic policy.

[00:01:51]Your Excellency, the employment problem did not just pop up.

[00:01:56]It has festered for many years.

[00:01:59]We in labor have blamed the problem on economic policy.

[00:02:04]In the mid-1980s, Ghana, along with many African countries in Africa, was forced to implement structural adjustment program. The structural adjustment program was based on neoliberal economics, which closed the state out of economic activities and deployed market forces.

[00:02:28]And since then, all our economic policies have been neoliberal in form and content.

[00:02:36]Your Excellency, structural adjustment and all successor policies made economic growth, measured by gross domestic product, a topmost priority of economic policy in Ghana.

[00:02:49]The policy goal is to achieve macroeconomic stability, which is loosely defined as the attainment of positive economic growth, single digit inflation, stable exchange rate, and positive balance of payments.

[00:03:05]Employment is missing from the framework because it is assumed, without any evidence whatsoever, that growth and macroeconomic stability automatically leads to the creation