Morocco’s Labor Crisis: 55% of Workers Lack Employment Contracts, Survey Reveals

In the third quarter of 2020, only 25.6% of employees have an open-ended contract, 11.8% have a fixed-term contract and 6.2% have a verbal contract. The rate of employees without any contract is 40.5% for women and 58.4% for men. One in 10 employed persons holds an occasional or seasonal job. In rural areas, this ratio is 13.1% and 8.1 in urban areas.

The other more worrying data concerns the active population, of which only a quarter, or 25.6%, benefit from medical coverage related to employment, according to the level of education and the sectors, of which the industry and crafts sector has the highest rate, i.e. 44.5%. In the third quarter of 2020, the activity rate reached 43.5%, the national employment survey pointed out, with 69.9% among men and 17.8% among women. As for the employment rate, it fell to 37.9%, among all categories, particularly among young people and women, a drop of 2.8 percentage points compared to the third quarter of 2019.

As for the number of unemployed, the survey revealed an increase of 368,000 people between the third quarters of 2019 and 2020, from 1,114,000 to 1,482,000 unemployed, an increase of 33%. The rate of unemployed who had previously held a job before this situation is 60%, of which 72.9% in urban areas and nearly 77.4% are men, an increase of 15.3 percentage points compared to the third quarter of 2019.

Regarding the diploma, 60.3% of the unemployed who have already worked have diplomas. 83.8% of these unemployed were employees and 12.5% were self-employed. In addition, the people outside the labor market aged 15 and over reached 15.15 million, of which 54% are housewives and 24% are students, details the national employment survey.