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Albania
Population and Work Force
Growing at least 2 percent annually during the 1980s, Albania's
population reached 3.2 million by 1990. Males accounted for about
51.5 percent of the Albanian populace. About 60 percent of the
country's men and 55 percent of its women were of working age.
Natural growth added about 45,000 persons to the working-age population
annually in the 1980s, about a 3.5 percent average yearly increase.
The work force officially numbered about 1 million people in 1980
and about 1.5 million when the economy collapsed in 1990. Albania's
principal industries were labor-intensive, but there were ample
labor reserves in the agricultural population. Workers officially
put in a six-day, forty-eight-hour week with at least two weeks
of annual vacation. People who fled Albania during the communist
era, however, reported that ten-hour workdays were the minimum
at many farms and factories
The government also assigned almost everyone to special "work
actions," which entailed gathering harvests and building irrigation
systems and railroad embankments; "volunteer" work details scavenged
scrap metal and beautified public parks on "Enver Days" to honor
the "father of the nation." Labor productivity declined about
1.7 percent per year from 1980 to 1988, an indication that the
economy was failing to create enough jobs to absorb the increasing
numbers of working-age people. Apart from diplomatic staff and
émigrés, no Albanian nationals were working abroad before the
communist system's decline.
Albania's employment profile was clearly that of a developing
country. In 1987, Albania's agriculture sector employed 52 percent
of the country's workers; industry, 22.9 percent; construction,
7.1 percent; trade, 4.6 percent; education and culture, 4.4 percent;
and transportation and telecommunications, 2.9 percent. The failure
of the communist economy, however, rocked the structure of Albania's
work force. Except for workers in the government bureaucracy,
schools and hospitals, the military and police, basic services,
and private firms, the turmoil left only a handful of Albanians
with productive jobs. The doors slammed shut, for example, at
almost all the enterprises in the mountainous Kukës District,
including a profitable chromite mine, a copper-smelting plant
that closed for lack of coal, and a textile factory that ran out
of wool and thread. Albania's government reported unemployment
at about 30 percent, but unofficial 1991 estimates indicated that
about 50 percent of the work force was jobless. Idled factory
workers tilled private plots, sought jobs in new private retail
outlets and handicraft workshops, or attempted to leave the country
to search for work abroad. Officials appealed to the international
community to provide material inputs necessary to jump-start Albanian
factories and hoped that a US$10 average monthly wage, one of
the world's lowest for a literate labor force, would entice foreign
investors.
Data as of April 1992
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