CRUEL CUT: PARLIAMENT PASSES BILL TO ANNUL UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS
SOCIETY | 24.10.13 | 16:00
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By GAYANE MKRTCHYAN
ArmeniaNow reporter
The National Assembly has passed a bill by first hearing annulling
the unemployment benefit system, which implies that since January
1 the government will no longer pay the monthly 18,000 drams’ ($45)
unemployment benefits.
Introducing the law on Employment, Republican Hakob Hakobyan, chairing
the committee on social welfare, said it is “immoral to give 18,000
drams’ benefit to citizens”.
“Rather than giving money and saying goodbye, we have given you your
money, now go away, but we have to offer real help with education,
direct funding, direct advice, direct employment chances,” he said.
Prosperous Armenia Party member Naira Zohrabyan takes as an offense
the claim that people give up work when they get unemployment benefits.
“There are no workplaces, no jobs, and to say ‘let us cut the
unemployment benefit and direct that to training people’ is not
serious. We have wonderful professionals, scholars, scientists who
are today, sorry to say this, in retail business, working as street
or market vendors. The inflated budget draft that’s been submitted
is a balloon, a myth that can never be brought to life, hence they
are simply trying to cut that expenditure,” says Zohrabyan.
Official statistics show more than 70,000 unemployed registered in
the country, 10,000 among whom receive 18,000 drams’ benefit.
Heritage’ s Zaruhi Postanjyan says the budget has its last means left,
more than a million people in the country are famished.
“This is the consequence of this criminal policy we have been unable
to get rid of for years now,” she said.
Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutyun MP Artsvik Minasyan
,terming the bill as strictly unsatisfactory, says depriving people
of unemployment benefits breaches the European Social Charter. The
government is eliminating several programs, not offering anything to
its unemployed citizens. He says he believes the state is playing a
trick to show international structures another official statistics
by which Armenia will have five percent unemployment, when in reality
it will be twenty percent.
“How can we benefit from it? Together we have to think how to reduce
the emigration rates by offering employment opportunities. We cannot
stop emigration if things remain as they are. We talk about the
demographic crisis, while families with children have to be first of
all engaged in employment projects. “This program suggests nothing
of the kind. They [the authorities] can claim now that they’ll do it
later, but I do not believe. I don’t trust the feasibility of anything
that’s to be left for the government to implement,” said Minasyan.
He says the draft law has to suggest economic, tax and financial
solutions, which the submitted document lacks, meaning that no progress
can be ensured in the sphere.
“The government has submitted a program on creating a hundred thousand
workplaces, consequently we can now predict the directions in which
those jobs will be created, and how that issue will be solved. Rather
than ceasing to exist, like now they are trying to deprive the
unemployed of their benefits by this bill, employment projects have
to develop active plans, and a lot of them, to gradually replace the
passive, ineffective ones,” says Minasyan.
Parallel to the draft law cancelling the unemployment benefit,
the parliament discussed another bill by which the RA president’s,
parliament speaker’s and prime-minister’s salaries should be raised.
Comparing the two bills, Armenian National Congress MP Nikol Pashinyan
said: “We were discussing the employment law and there were eleven
law-makers present in the session hall. As soon as we got to the salary
bill, the hall suddenly got crowded. We have adopted the disgrace of
a bill on cancelling the 18,000 drams benefit, and now with serious
faces are discussing the issue of raising the president’s and the
premier’s salaries.”
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