Labor
In 2003 Tajikistan’s active labor force was estimated at 3.4 million, of whom 64% were employed in agriculture, 24% in services, and 10% in industry and construction. After declining in the early 2000s, the real wages of state employees were raised in 2004 and 2005. Because of the continued dominance of state farms, the majority of workers are government employees, although only a small number rely completely on wages. Driven by high unemployment, in 2006 an estimated 700,000 workers found seasonal or permanent employment in Russia and other countries. Their remittances, estimated at US$600 million in 2005, are an important economic resource in Tajikistan; in 2004 an estimated 15% of households depended mainly on those payments. In May 2009 remittances to Tajiks had fallen to $525 million, a 34% decline from the previous year. Immediately before the 2008 financial crisis there were an estimated 1.5 million foreign workers sending remittances back to Tajikistan. In 2006 the average wage was US$27 per month. The national unemployment rate was estimated unofficially as high as 40% in 2006, but in rural areas unemployment has exceeded 60%. Unemployment has been higher in the southern Khatlon Province than in the northern Soghd Province. Mean wages were $0.66 per manhour in 2009.
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Famous quotes containing the word labor:
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In a virtuous government, and more especially in times like these, public offices are, what the should be, burthens to those appointed to them which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor and great private loss.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“By the “mud-sill” theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly.... Free labor insists on universal education.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)