Limited Opportunities in the Guatemalan Job Market

By Kieran Boyle 

This article is based mainly off a interview with Heber Pérez, which was translated by Professor Margarita Diaz.

Heber Pérez, an educator and community leader in San Lucas Tolimán, wants young people in his town to get an education and find opportunities in the area, but he knows that even an education is no guarantee for a job.

“In San Lucas Tolimán, young people have access to basically two careers, one is accounting and the other is education,” he says.

Pérez himself is a product of that system and worked as a teacher in San Lucas for many years. Pérez describes what working as a teacher was like.

“I would be making $1,000 a month, for a half days work with 20 or 25 students in my classroom teaching the same thing every day, every year, for years to come, so it is a very cushy job,” he says.

Pérez is describing how, for a relatively small amount of easy work, teachers make very good money especially compared to others in their community. For example, the minimum wage for a plantation worker is just under 22 quetzales a day (about $3), about 660 quetzales ($85) a month assuming they work every day and are paid the minimum, which many plantation workers are not, (Abell 2007). On top of this, according to Glassdoor, the median teacher salary is closer to $500 a month, as opposed to the $1,000 a month Pérez was making. This makes teaching a popular profession.

“So a lot of people studied teaching because it gave them economic and financial stability,” he says. “The point is that then the population grew and there were no more openings.”

Pérez is saying that the number of people becoming teachers outpaced the population growth and the field became oversaturated. This meant that there was a large group of people who were educated but unable to do any of the jobs needed to improve their communities. Pérez explains that most people don’t have the resources and the capabilities to improve their economic situation in Guatemala.

“Many of us don’t have access to the means of production that allow us to grow economically,” he says.

For example, about 2% of the population controls over 80% of the land, and three-quarters of Guatemalans live in poverty, (Abell 2007). Perez points to the country’s economic system as the root cause for these problems.

“So why is there so many teachers and so few jobs, I think that it is because of the Guatemalan system,” he says. “And this isn’t just for teachers. Regardless of what you study in Guatemala, once you graduate you will not be able to find a job, because nobody has opportunities. The biggest problem here is the lack of opportunities.”

This further exemplifies how there are very few opportunities to advance economically in Guatemala. One of the reasons for the lack of jobs is corruption, Pérez says.

“Due to the corruption here in Guatemala there are many businesses that do not want to operate here,” he explains. “That also limits the opportunities that we have. This is why we have to find other ways of getting income.”

International organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have reported on how money in Guatemala has been linked to organized crime, and how dirty money has been used to fund electoral campaigns.

However, according to Pérez, the main reason why this generation of Guatemalans can’t move up economically is the high cost of education. He saw it clearly in his hometown of San Lucas.

“You were able to get into the public university in Sololá to study [education], [but] you still had to pay for your transport to get there and your food and it’s about 100 quetzales a day,” he says.

When he was a student, he explains, tuition at the public university was 185 quetzales ($24) a month.

This generation of people in San Lucas Tolimán has to pay about 3000 quetzales ($386) a month to attend university as opposed to the 185 quetzales that people just a couple of years ago had to. The average income per capita in Guatemala in 2022 was just short of $5,000. This price for education is way too high for most people in San Lucas Tolimán and so they will be forced to remain in their current economic situation unless change is made to the system.

Sources:

Salary: Teacher in Guatemala 2024. (n.d.). Glassdoor. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/guatemala-teacher-salary-SRCH_IL.0,9_IN101_KO10,17.htm

The Neoliberal World Order: The View from the Highlands of Guatemala. (n.d.). NACLA. https://nacla.org/article/neoliberal-world-order-view-highlands-guatemala

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/guatemala