Gambia
Title of the survey
Survey of Employment, Earnings and Hours of work (up to 1992)
Organization responsible
Central Statistics Department (CSD), Ministry of Finance and Economic
Affairs
Periodicity of the survey
Annual, in December.
Objectives of the survey
To provide a measure of levels of employment in the various industries;
average weekly earnings of workers by industry; and average number of
hours worked per week in each of the industries at regular interval.
The survey results are used for planning and policy purposes.
Main labour topics covered by the survey
Employment, earnings, hours of work and vacancies.
Reference period
Employment and vacancies: a specific date (11 December).
Earnings and hours of work: the whole month of December.
Coverage of the survey
Geographical
The whole country.
Industrial
All divisions of economic activity, except mining and quarrying, which
is not relevant.
Excluded are the armed forces, the police and household services.
Establishments
Registered establishments with five or more employees in the formal
sector.
Persons
All employees. Excluded are proprietors, partners, unpaid family
workers, commission agents, private domestic servants and the
self-employed.
Occupations
Data are not collected on individual occupations, but according to
five broad occupational groups:
- managerial and administrative;
- professional and technical;
- clerical;
- skilled;
- unskilled.
Concepts and definitions
Employment
Employees are defined as persons on the establishment's
payroll who (i) performed some work for pay or profit for any part of
the pay period including 11 December, and (ii) had already worked in
their present job but were temporarily absent on the reference day
because of illness or injury, industrial dispute, vacation or other
reason.
Data are collected separately on the number of employees, by sex and
occupational group, and within each group, by citizenship:
- national employees, i.e. Gambian citizens;
- non-national employees, i.e. non-Gambians (diplomatic and
international staff are excluded).
In addition, data on the number of employees on the payroll are
collected separately for the following categories and by sex:
- expatriates, i.e. non-African employees by citizenship;
- established staff, i.e. all permanent, quasi-permanent and
temporary employees who are paid on the basis of a monthly salary
scale (i.e. salaried employees);
- regular employees, i.e. those who are paid on the basis of time
(e.g. daily rated) or output (e.g. piece-rated) and have been engaged by
the establishment for a indefinite, but fairly long period of time. The
services of such employees can be terminated at short notice;
- casual employees, i.e. those who are hired for specific short-term
periods (usually less than a week at a time) and are paid on a time or
output basis. The services of such employees can be terminated without
any notice.
Earnings
Data are collected on the total gross remuneration paid to
employees, as defined above, during the month of December.
Total gross remuneration is defined as the total cash payments in the
form of:
- wages, salaries and cash allowances (e.g. commissions, bonuses,
etc.), and
- overtime payments,
before deductions for loans, pension contributions, house rent, income
tax, trade union dues, etc. It excludes payments to the employees in
the form of salary advances, loans, arrears, gratuities, compensation
for injuries and payments in kind.
Data on total gross remuneration are collected separately for each of
the four categories of employees:
- expatriates;
- established staff;
- regular;
- casual.
Wage/salary rates
Not relevant.
Hours of work
Data are collected on hours actually worked during the month
of reference. They refer to the total number of hours of attendance of
all employees, by category.
Data are also collected on the number of days worked during the month of
December, i.e. the total number of days of attendance of all employees,
by category, excluding holidays, leave and overtime.
International recommendations
The definition of gross remuneration used in this survey conforms to the
international guidelines on gross cash earnings. Earnings in kind are
not collected in this survey.
The concept of hours actually worked used in the survey conforms to
the international guidelines.
Classifications
Industrial
Data on employment and earnings are classified according to the major
divisions of the International Standard Industrial Classification of all
economic activities (ISIC), Rev.2, 1968.
Occupational
Employment data are classified according to the five occupational groups
(see under Coverage: Occupations).
Others
Employment and earnings data are classified by size of establishments
(six size groups), type of ownership (government, parastatal and
private), region or local government area (eight regions), and according
to employees' characteristics: category and sex. Employment data are
also classified by citizenship.
Sample size and design
Statistical unit
The reporting unit is the establishment in the formal sector.
It is defined as an economic unit which produces goods or services, such
as a factory, mine, office or store, generally at a single physical
location, and engaged predominantly in one economic activity. Where a
single location encompasses two or more distinct and separate
activities, these are treated as separate establishments, provided that
separate payroll records are available and certain other criteria are
met.
Survey universe / sample frame
The Directory of Establishments set up in March 1985 and the 1985
inquiry list published by the Central Statistics Department. These
contain the name, registered location, postal address, industry code and
size code of all registered establishments. The Directory and the list
covered 957 establishments of all sizes, of which 586 with five
or more paid employees were found to be in operation (excluding
establishments related to armed forces, diplomatic and international
affairs).
The 1985 Directory is updated mainly through the Registrar General's
Office which provides information on all newly registered
establishments.
Sample design
The survey is based on a complete enumeration of registered
establishments.
Field work
Data collection
This starts in January, when questionnaires and instruction sheets are
sent by mail to all establishments throughout the country. Hand
delivery and personal visits by enumerators from the Labour Statistics
Section of the CSD are also used in some instances. For the public
sector establishments, the questionnaires are sent to the various heads
of expenditure. Respondents are asked to return the completed
questionnaires within four weeks. Reminders are sent to all
non-responding establishments after the first deadline.
Survey questionnaire
This consists of three parts:
- Part A provides general information on the establishment (name,
address, telephone number (if any), type of ownership, kind of activity,
and identification code (industry/local government area code);
- Part B deals with employment particulars (number of employees by
sex, broad occupational groups disaggregated into nationals and
non-nationals, current vacancies and additional labour demand within the
next calendar year);
- Part C gives information on the number of employees by category and
by sex, on the number of person-days worked, hours
actually worked and gross cash remuneration.
Substitution of sampling units
Not relevant.
Data processing and editing
Data are processed, coded and edited manually. The questionnaires are
subjected to close reviewing in accordance with editing instructions
prepared for that purpose. Entries are checked for correctness and
completeness, and consistency checks are applied on statistics of the
total number of employment categories, total number of employees by
occupational categories and derived statistics related to the number of
person-days worked, number of hours worked, monthly earnings and
overtime earnings. Doubtful and incomplete entries are earmarked and
enumerators pay personal visits to the establishments concerned for
correcting the inconsistencies. Manual tabulations are then prepared
and data are finally transferred to a set of predesigned tables which
are presented in the final report.
Types of estimates
Total number of employees, average daily and weekly earnings and hours
worked.
Average daily hours worked per person is obtained by dividing the total
number of person-hours actually worked by the total number of
person-days worked.
Average hourly earnings are obtained by dividing the total gross cash
remuneration for the month by the total number of person-hours actually
worked.
Average weekly hours worked are obtained by, first, converting
person-hours from a monthly to a weekly basis, for each establishment,
and then dividing the total weekly person-hours worked by the total
number of employees on the reference date. The conversion factor is
calculated by dividing the number of workdays in the week by the number
of workdays in the month, separately for the government sector, and for
the parastatal and private sector.
Average weekly earnings are obtained by multiplying the average hourly
earnings by the average weekly hours worked.
Construction of indices
Not relevant.
Weighting of sample results
Not relevant.
Adjustments
Non-response
No adjustments are made. Estimates of employment are computed for
non-responding establishments.
Other bias
No adjustments are made for any other bias.
Use of benchmark data
Not relevant.
Seasonal variations
Not relevant.
Indicators of reliability of the estimates
Coverage of the sampling frame
Efforts are made to cover all establishments in the formal sector, by
updating the Directory on a regular basis.
Sampling error / sampling variance
Not computed.
Non-response rate
Out of a total of 586 establishments listed in the December 1987 survey,
124 did not respond, i.e. about 21 per cent in terms of units, and 23.5
per cent in terms of employment.
Non-sampling errors
Not relevant.
Conformity with other sources
There is no other source of data on employment and earnings.
Available series
Published results include cross-tabulations of:
- total number of employees by sector, citizenship, major industry
group, category and broad occupational group;
- vacancies and expected vacancies;
- average daily and weekly hours actually worked by sector, major
industry group and category of employees;
- average daily and weekly earnings by sector, major industry group
and category of employees.
History of the survey
The Central Statistics Department started a quarterly survey of
establishments on employment, earnings and hours of work in 1973. This
survey covered all establishments with five or more employees, and was
conducted in the last month of each quarter, until the first quarter of
1977. It was then suspended until 1979, and again continued for three
quarters, discontinued once again until the first quarter of 1983, then
reinstalled for six quarters until June 1984. Finally, the quarterly
survey was suspended.
In September 1985, a new project started with a revised list of
establishments, and redesigned and expanded questionnaires, instructions
and procedures for collection and analysis of the data. The Survey of
Employment, Earnings and Hours of work was introduced, in March 1986.
Subsequent rounds took place in December of each year.
In 1993, the survey was completely reorganized in order to cope with the
fact that the basic frame was becoming outdated and the response from
establishments had been declining progressively over the years, with the
result that the findings of the survey became less and less
representative of the actual situation.
A new list of establishments was first set up, beginning with Banjul and
Kanifing Municipal Council. This was done by a team of enumerators
combing the different areas for identification of establishments
eligible to be included in the frame, with their address, nature of
activity and number of employees by sex. This exercise was completed in
October 1993.
Simultaneously, the survey instrument was rationalised with a view to
improving the response rate. The questionnaire was simplified by
retaining only the essential questions on employment and remuneration,
deleting questions on average hours worked on which replied received
in the past tended to be stereotyped, and at the same time providing for
additional information on earnings by sex disaggregation.
The new survey involves visits by enumerators to establishments, instead
of the former mail questionnaire technique. In 1993, it covered the
private sector only. The reference period was the whole month of
February, and data collection was spread over a period of two months
commencing in March 1993. About 400 establishments were contacted in
Banjul and Kanifing Municipal Council, and 200 questionnaires were sent
to establishments in the provinces (owing to resource constraints,
repeated visits could not be arranged in the provinces).
The concepts and definitions used in the survey, such as those
concerning the establishment or national or non-national employee.
and the classifications adopted were the same as in the earlier surveys.
The concept of gross cash remuneration remained unchanged. The survey
provides estimates of number of employees by industry, occupational
group, citizenship, etc.; and statistics of average monthly and daily
earnings.
Documentation
Central Statistics Department: Survey of Employment, Earnings and
Hours of work (annual, Banjul). This publication contains
methodological information and an analysis of the survey results; it
was published some 18 months after the survey reference period.
idem: Survey on Employment and Remuneration (ibid., February
1993); the present publication was released eight months after the
survey reference period.
Confidentiality / Reliability criteria
The publication and release of data are subject to confidentiality
rules, whereby individual units should not be identified.
Other information
Data supplied to the ILO for publication
The following estimates are published in the Yearbook of Labour
Statistics:
- Paid employment (employees): general level, by industry and in
specific industries (Tables 3A to 8, except Table 6);
- Average monthly earnings of employees: non-agricultural activities
and specific industries (Tables 16 to 20, except Table 18).