More Filipinos chasing fewer jobs, survey says

More Filipinos are looking for work, but the number of jobs available to them has not grown.

This was one of the findings of the Department of Agriculture’s Labor and Population Force Survey released last week and which mapped out the country’s working population within and outside the agriculture sector.

According to the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS), the country’s working age population and labor force are rising but the employment rate remains stagnant.

The survey noted there are 60.72 million Filipinos of working age and the number is growing at 2.4 percent every year.

In 2010, the country’s labor force, those who are employed or job hunting, was at 38.89 million, expanding by 2.3 percent annually.

Of that number, 36.04 million have jobs, while 2.85 million remain jobless.

The employment level rose by an average of 2.5 percent per year, while the unemployment rate grew by an average of 0.3 percent per year.

Across regions, Metro Manila and the southern Luzon provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon (Calabarzon), where most industrial parks are located, have the highest number of persons in the labor force at about 5 million each.

In the capital, this increased by 1.8 percent and in Calabarzon, by 2.6 percent.

The highest growth in the labor force was recorded in central Visayas and the Zamboanga peninsula at 3.2 percent each.

Although the number of people of working age has been growing, the number of those who actually found jobs has not.

Although the number of Filipinos who have found jobs has risen, the national employment rate—which measures the employment-to-population ratio, has not been growing significantly.

In 2010, the employment rate was at 92.7 percent and growth was only at 0.2 percent annually.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate stood at 7.4 percent, a slight contraction from the 8 percent in 2006.

However, the number of jobless grew by 0.3 percent to 2.85 million last year from 2.82 million in 2006, BAS said.

Unemployment high in Metro

According to the report, Metro Manila recorded the most number of jobless at 570,000 in 2010.  But the number declined by 3.3 percent per year.

Calabarzon had 470,000 unemployed persons, with the number growing by an average of 1.6 percent per year.

BAS said the agriculture sector employed 11.96 million in 2010. The number grew by 0.6 percent annually.

The bulk of agricultural employment was still noted in western Visayas at 1.16 million. It contracted by 0.5 percent over the years.

Child labor

Of all the regions in the country, the rate of agricultural employment was highest in  the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) at 71.1 percent.

Most of the labor force in ARMM are engaged in farming or fishery work.

Child labor remains a problem in the agriculture sector, which employs about 60 percent of child workers in the country, the BAS said.

In 2010, the number of children aged 5-17 years working in the agriculture sector totaled 1.35 million. This represents 61.3 percent of the country’s total working children.

Working children are particularly rampant in Mindanao, BAS said.

“At the regional level, northern Mindanao posted the biggest number of working children aged 5 to 17 years at 0.15 million children and this accounted for 65.9 percent of the region’s total working children,” the report noted.

“Meanwhile, ARMM recorded the biggest number at 88 percent constituting 73,000 children engaged in agriculture,” it added. –Kristine L. Alave, Philippine Daily Inquirer