WHATEVER works

Colombia is honing its labor force for the demands and challenges of global commerce but must ensure the entire working population comes along for the ride.

On the one hand, “workforce” is just an economic metric. Viewed differently, it becomes another word for population, informed by national, regional, and individual factors. Governments would do well to consider this. By presenting its raft of labor reforms geared at raising the conditions and income of workers early in 2023, that is just what Colombia’s leftist administration did. At the time, Minister of Labor Gloria Inés Ramírez referred to it as the “most ambitious labor reform of this century” that “dignified the value of production from a human perspective.” The reform claimed to give representation to those workers long ignored, such as domestic service employees among other informal workers. At the time, Colombia’s workforce numbered 22 million employed, of whom almost 9 million were women and 13 million were men.

IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO

The nurturing of diversely skilled human resources responsive to industry needs is essential for Colombia to reach its economic potential. Within the process, the recruitment agency’s job is to build a firm’s capacity in line with its business strategies and growth targets. Having expanded its Latam footprint to Colombia in 2011, “Page Group was the first to bring innovative recruitment methodologies to the country, and we are now the largest headhunters in Colombia,” says its President Felipe Delgado, who explains how Colombia’s preeminent recruitment agency plans to increase its current team of headhunters to around 112 people. “Our work is not just about volume—we develop people and specialties.”

In July 2023, in cooperation with the Goethe Institute, the German Federal Employment Agency launched a program offering to train 2,200 workers from Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico to meet local needs for specific skills. Those selected also get to learn German and start a new life in Germany. The scheme was the largest cooperation to attract legal migration of skilled workers and apprentices from Latin America to Germany. It appears that Germany requires 1.5 million immigrants yearly to meet the annual quota of 400,000 new citizens required to maintain the workforce.

Now, let’s consider Lloreda Camacho, Colombia, the country’s fourth-oldest law firm. In a TBY interview, Associate Director in the Department of Foreign Trade, Diana Ramirez, explained how “we are committed to reinforcing the training, growth, and development of our professionals, technicians, and administrative staff through implementing new programs.” The Growing Starts with Me program provides a “well-defined career plan with the objective of helping individuals grow professionally, by enhancing their individual skills.”

Moving on from law firms to legally unrepresented, we note that approximately 55% of Colombia’s population works informally, lacking the safety net of a contract or social security. This concerns much more than evasion, speaking as it does of regional imbalances and social discrepancies where generations of people lack the education and access to the formal economy. Initiatives are afoot, however, to integrate public-private initiatives to enable the transition to formal employment. A local forum on employment staged last year recommended a more lateral approach to defining workforce productivity. Using the example of an informal vendor selling a soft drink, the point was made that while the drink had already derived from a formal production chain, the vendor, while not paying taxes, is ultimately the loser through missed access to social services and a pension. The consequence? A generational poverty trap with no safety net, much less potential for self-improvement. Many in Colombia are limited to street vending or work on the production chain’s extreme fringes. To address this reality, the government seems sympathetic to the so-called “popular economy” where funds are managed through grassroots organizations and cooperatives.

NOT JUST WINDOW-DRESSING

iNNpulsa Colombia is at the front line in Colombia’s ongoing industrialization. And as General Manager Hernán Ceballos tells TBY, “We focus on projects to improve the popular economy.” In Colombia, the textile and dressmaking industry, for example, represents 20% of manufacturing GDP and 18% of employment. Exemplifying iNNpulsa efforts to raise the potential of such sectors are its “pilots for productive development centers in Bogotá based on similar industrial service models in Italy focused on technological innovation.” Between 2014 and 2015, Bogotá had five such centers, with, “two for dressmaking, one for woodwork, one for footwear, one for graphic arts, and the other one for technology.” The firm’s expertise derives from its deep dive into each region of operation. An ethnographic consideration gives greater insight into the “social aspect, because people’s behavior changes according to the region, and so do their values.”

An increased national workforce is more than an expanded tax base for government expenditure to lean on. Colombia’s economic story today is as much about fintechs as flowers, and the universally applicable highend skills acquired in one sector transfer to others. And where the home country offers slimmer prospects, the skilled worker may also turn their attention to foreign markets.