Employment quality in RP found wanting

THE National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) said that despite improvement in the economy, the quality of employment remains a concern.

In a statement, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Cayetano Paderanga on Thursday suggested that the government continue pursuing policies that will raise investments and improve productivity as well as income per capita in the country.

“While the Philippine economy has shown relative improvements in the labor sector in July 2010, the quality of employment remains a concern,” he said.

Data from the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) showed that the country’s per capita to gross domestic product (GDP) as of second quarter of this year was P22,278.

Paderanga said that although the economy generated new employment, most of the visibly underemployed and unpaid family workers were largely in the agriculture sector.

In the first half of the year, the economy as measured by GDP grew by 7.9 percent compared to the 0.9 percent during the same period last year. GDP is the total value of goods and services produced in a country in a year.

For the full year, the government expects the economy to grow between 5 percent and 6 percent.

Because of this, Paderanga said that there is a need to implement aggressive policies and programs to improve the quality of employment and address skills mismatch.

He added that the government should strengthen implementation of policies that address the existing skills mismatch problem in the labor sector, so as to reduce the portion of educated but unemployed sectors of the society.

The National Statistics Office (NSO) earlier reported that unemployment went down to 6.9 percent as of July, the lowest since October 2008. A year ago the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent.

According to the agency, the actual number of jobless Filipinos was 2.7 million, lower than the 2.9 million in July last year and 3.1 million in April.

Paderanga attributed the lower unemployment rate to more people working in the agriculture sector, slight improvement in the employment level and the slower labor force growth.

Overall, the total number of Filipinos in the labor force grew by 1.5 percent compared to last year. But this was lower than the rate of 2.9 percent from July 2008 to July 2009.

“This is because Filipinos who were pushed to work during the crises in 2008 and 2009 may have withdrawn from the labor force since they can now afford to stop working or looking for work,” the NEDA chief said.

Meanwhile, about 777,000 Filipinos were newly employed on a full-time basis in July 2010. –Darwin G. Amojelar Senior Reporter, Manila Times