To Uruguay's image of six million cows, grazing for the necessary fattening time to be sold to the large slaughterhouse industry, is added a different image, of offices - perhaps in some cases different from the classic boxes - an industry of few and intangible inputs, little physical infrastructure and dependent on human ingenuity: that of software.
The Minister of Industry, Energy and Mining, Carolina Cosse, has insisted that technological progress is an opportunity and not a concern. At a dinner organised by Somos Uruguay magazine, to which she was invited to talk about the role of public companies in the industry of the future, she said she was convinced of the need to strengthen the software industry, for several reasons: it cannot find trained people and is looking abroad; "it absorbs like a sponge and grows"; and, in addition, it can provide traditional industries with tools for their technification. In this sense, he mentioned that while the meat processing industry - one of the national productive emblems - today directly employs 16,500 people, the software industry employs 22,000.
And the figure of 16,500 could even be "an exaggeration". Luis Muñoz, secretary general of the Federation of Workers in the Meat and Allied Industries (FOICA), told the newspaper that the official workforce includes 12,000 people, although most of the outsourced workers (around 2,000) are added for nine months of the year.
As for the 22,000 people employed in the software industry, "it could be even more, depending on the calculation, because sometimes it depends on how the sectors of activity are categorised," observed Leonardo Loureiro, president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (CUTI).
The growth of jobs in this industry, which has been in the country for more than 30 years, is "structural", according to Loureiro: "Those who graduate from universities and formal training almost all enter directly, and another portion is distributed among other organisations that require the services of professionals of the kind we need," he observed. For the systems engineer, this is a "very small" increase, which "is not what we want, but not because we can't give them work, it's the other way around; we can't take on more projects or generate new software product solutions because we don't have the people to carry them out".
For his part, the president of the Uruguayan Meat Industry Association, Marcelo Secco, believes that the number of employees in the sector has remained "relatively stable" in recent years. For the businessman, there are "strong threats" to the fall in the employment of labour: "the lower availability of animals for slaughter due to factors such as live exports, low agricultural profitability, the incessant increase in the direct cost of labour, the lack of flexibility in the internal tasks of the industrial processes, the growing labour conflict and the incessant development of opportunities for technological incorporation in various processes". Even so, he argued that technological automation has not yet had a major impact on jobs "because of the high manual workload of many of the tasks".
For his part, Loureiro said that CUTI works on "awareness-raising": "to promote new careers and forms of training and at the same time to show and explain why it is good and even more interesting to work in this industry, which is one of those with the greatest future; that is very clear". From the point of view of the worker, he argued that "the decision he has to make is whether he wants to be the builder of his future or a mere spectator". "For me, today, the only two sectors of economic activity that can have exponential growth are ICT [information and communication technologies] and biotechnology, which can be perfectly transformed into exporters of 3 billion dollars; and the best thing is that the only thing you need is people, because to sell more meat, you need more cows, and the same with soya, wood; for all that you need raw materials, and you are conditioned by nature and by mineral resources," he concluded.
Source: La Diaria
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