When in Tehran you stand just some minutes by the newsstand, you can see that most young people buy ‘Hamshahri’, probably not for the news but for the ‘Hamshahri Requirements’, which is the biggest and the most prevalent newspaper for employment ads. ‘Employment Advertise’ is a title that most graduates are searching for in newspapers. Some of them are repeatedly sending a résumé to many companies during one or two years, and they went for an employment interview several times. For a graduate who is looking for a job, going for an employment interview has become part of his or her daily schedule. At last if they are lucky, they can find a job that has no relation whatsoever to their education and interests, with a payment that just can cover their basic costs. In Iran it is not important in which university you have studied or what your GPA is or not even how skillful you are. Graduates who get employed immediately after graduation usually work in one of their families’ company.

Most of the advertisements are for private companies. Being employed in governmental offices is something like a dream for young people. It is a guaranteed job. Getting a job in such companies is so hard but after the employment process, working there is so easy because indeed almost nothing is being done in these offices. My uncle works in one of our ministries, and he told me that all of the employees are at work at 8 o’clock, almost all of them snooze until 9 o’clock, then they gather in one of the rooms and eat breakfast, then they come back to their offices at about 10, and they play with the papers and files on their desks and talk with their roommates, then they go for lunch and pray from 12 to 1, and after coming back from lunch they say that they are tired and they can’t do anything beneficial, and they go back home at 4 in the afternoon. This is the daily schedule of a government employee. None of them will get fired because this is the usual method in government offices. To me, this method of working is close to being dead!

I was talking to one of my friends who has graduated as a Master of Science, and still she is searching for a job. She told me that last week she saw an employment ad from the oil ministry, and they asked retired people of the Oil Company to cooperate with them. Indeed: with all of this young graduated potential in Iran they want to re-employ their retired. Unemployment makes young people and their family nervous and it seems that statesmen have no idea or program for this dilemma except giving wrong statistics. Ahmadinejad said that by the year 2012 we will have no unemployed in Iran, and people answered yes, of course, after these two years all of the unemployed will die and in this way we won’t have any unemployed anymore.

A cynical joke, of which we have many in Iran.

کلیدواژه ها: N. Sayeh, unemployment |  Print | نشر مطلب