You are Natalia Ugarte, the labour-market analyst at Puerto Roble's city hall. Solana Mall closes in sixty days, the city's unemployment rate stands at 8.0%, and the Mayor wants your reading of eight workers' files at 09:00 on Thursday, an hour before her press conference.
The situation
Solana opened in 1998 with sixty shops. Today it employs 220 people directly and supports about 80 more through cleaning and security contractors, food trucks and the businesses around it. Foot traffic is 35% below 2019, three anchor stores have closed, and online sales now take 28% of Costaria's retail spending, against 9% a decade ago. At the same time, the country is in a downturn that has cut its output by 3%.
The employment office has prepared eight representative files, and you must put a label on each: frictional, structural, cyclical, seasonal, underemployed or discouraged. The label does not stay in the table: it decides which line of the CO$50 million budget each person goes to. Job matching: CO$5 million for about 600 people, running within 60 days. Retraining grants: CO$15 million for about 600, with courses of 6 to 12 months. Road and school projects: CO$20 million and about 400 construction jobs. And two smaller lines, for the hardest cases and for the long-term unemployed.
Almost every file reads without argument. One has split your unit in two. Diego, 38, managed the shoe store, which has already closed: twelve years in retail management, a team of ten, profit and loss, hiring and scheduling. Physical retail is shrinking for good. The downturn is real. And logistics, hospitality and service firms say they are looking for exactly that profile, at roughly his wage.
Your deputy reads it as a search problem; the education department, which runs the grants, as a skills problem; and the national government keeps saying that every job lost this year is the downturn's fault. The chief of staff only wants to know, before ten, which line Diego's file goes into.