Honduras HUMAN RESOURCES
Composition of Labor Force
Much of the labor force ekes out an existence in the informal
sector.
Courtesy Dennis W. Calkin (top) and Ann Gardner (bottom)
Honduras suffers from an overabundance of unskilled and
uneducated laborers. Most Honduran workers in 1993
continued to be
employed in agriculture, which accounted for about 60
percent of
the labor force. More than half of the rural population,
moreover,
remains landless and heavily dependent on diminishing
seasonal
labor and low wages. Fifty-five percent of the farming
population
subsists on less than two hectares and earns less than
US$70 per
capita per year from those plots, mostly by growing
subsistence
food crops.
In 1993 only about 9 to 13 percent of the Honduran
labor force
was engaged in the country's tiny manufacturing
sector--one of the
smallest in Central America. Skilled laborers are scarce.
Only
25,000 people per year, of which about 21 percent are
industrial
workers, graduate yearly from the National Institute of
Professional Training (Instituto Nacional de Formación
Profesional-
-INFOP) established in 1972.
Hundreds of small manufacturing firms, the traditional
backbone
of Honduran enterprise, began to go out of business
beginning in
the early 1990s, as import costs rose and competition
through
increasing wages for skilled labor from the mostly
Asian-owned
assembly industries strengthened. The small Honduran
shops, most of
which had manufactured clothing or food products for the
domestic
market, traditionally received little support in the form
of credit
from the government or the private sector and were more
like
artisans than conventional manufacturers. Asian-owned
export
assembly firms (maquiladoras), operating mostly in
free
zones established by the government on the Caribbean
coast, attract
thousands of job seekers and swell the populations of new
city
centers such as San Pedro Sula, Tela, and La Ceiba. Those
firms
employed approximately 16,000 workers in 1991.
About one-third of the Honduran labor force was
estimated to be
working in the service or "other" sector in 1993. That
classification usually means that a person ekes out a
precarious
livelihood in the urban informal sector or as a poorly
paid
domestic. As unemployment soared throughout Central
America in the
1980s, more and more people were forced to rely on their
own
ingenuity in order to simply exist on the fringes of
Honduran
society.
Data as of December 1993
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