Jobless youth ‘a growing epidemic’ in labor sector

THE number of unemployed and underemployed youth in the country has become a “growing epidemic” and the government should immediately address this problem if it hopes to fulfill its vision of inclusive growth, Sen. Paolo Benigno Aquino said in a Senate hearing on Thursday.

“Youth unemployment is a growing epidemic in the Philippines and all over the world,” the senator said during the first hearing of the Senate Committee on Youth, which he chairs.

Citing data from the Department of Labor and Employment, Aquino said 1.42 million, or more than half, of the country’s 2.8 million job less citizens are aged 15 to 24 and belong to the youth sector.

“We call on government agencies, educational institutions, and private companies to work more closely together in solving the problems of youth unemployment and underemployment,” Aquino said, proposing more financing, training, market linkages and other support to young entrepreneurs.

Although he did not specify what programs he was pursuing for the purpose, Aquino said youth employment is “one of the advocacies of our office [and] we need support from different sectors to push for policies and programs that will open up opportunities for young Filipinos.

According to a 2013 International Labour Organization report, Asian youth will likely find it harder to find decent and permanent jobs in the future.

“The fewer young people in decent and productive work, the less economic growth there is; the less employment growth there is, the fewer the opportunities to get youth into productive work,” said Sara Elder , co-author of the ILO study Global Employment Trends for Youth 2013.

The report said the Southeast Asia and Pacific youth unemployment rate was 13.3% in 2013 and is expected to hit 14% in 2017, above the world average of 12.6% which is expected to reach 12.8% in 2018.

The report said the situation in the Philippines was encouraging because the youth unemployment rate dropped to 16% in 2012 from 16.6% in 2011, but the ILO noted that that was because part-time or irregular work.

“In the Philippines, youth aged 15-24 saw a decrease in unemployment from 18.6% in April 2008 to 17.3% in April 2009. During that 1-year period, however, the share of youth working part-time (less than 30 hours per week), increased notably from 26.6% to 32%,” the report said.

Even the World Bank admitted that the main labor issue in the Philippines is not unemployment, but underemployment.

“The real labor problem in the country is not the unemployed,” World Bank Philippines senior economist Karl Kendrick Chua recently told journalists.

Chua said most of the labor force that are considered to be unemployed “have college degrees that can afford to be unemployed for the meantime.”

“It is the 20 percent of workers who are underemployed [that’s the problem] because these people cannot afford to be without work,” Chua said. –Macon Ramos-Araneta, Manila Standard Today