However, he warned that Uruguay has everything to generate a cultural change that favors it in this regard. "We will not have more companies with 500 employees, but we will have many small companies with high technology," he said.
In her speech at the Somos Uruguay business dinner, Cosse was concerned about the competitiveness of companies and jobs. She presented some data showing an international change. "The economy has changed, the way of producing, business models and science and technology have developed exponentially," she said.
He reflected that the most successful companies have been operating for 5 to 20 years, not 100, as was the case in the past.
For Cosse, it should not be forgotten that the generation of many jobs used to take decades and that it is a big question mark whether the economy, with the current dynamics, will achieve the number of jobs that the most powerful firms in the industry of the last century achieved. However, he added that there are several studies that indicate that five large companies are achieving employment figures very close to those achieved 40 years ago.
It seems very clear that it is key to incorporate technology to survive and improve, "and this is a factor that should not be feared, because labor automation should be taken as an opportunity," he explained.
In this regard, he said that the highest probabilities of automation are in jobs with less qualification and the lowest automation happens in jobs with more qualification. "Uruguay cannot transform overnight, but it has the conditions to do so and must prepare to go through a real industrial revolution," he said.
He mentioned that the meat processing industry currently employs 15,000 people and that the software industry employs 22,000, with such a notorious demand that it requires human resources abroad. According to him, this should be seen as an opportunity to train Uruguayans to fill the vacancies. "We must bet on a cultural change in the population because we cannot think that we are going to go back to having companies with 500 employees. We will surely have many small, highly technical companies," he said.
The Ministry of Industry should facilitate that path; "that's what we are doing, building a portal for entrepreneurship, or to facilitate the industrial development that already exists," he said.
For Cosse, it is also very important to protect the autonomy of public companies. "They have to have a common space for strategic thinking where the most advanced things are raised and their role is permanently analyzed. We have to generate trust infrastructure in these companies to generate comprehensive projects," he concluded.
Source: Presidency
Connect