A dequacy of employment opportunities has always been any nation’s dependable yardstick of progress. Fact is, jobs would abound in a robust economy, while a poor one could not produce enough work opportunities for its populace.

The Philippine Labor Market
In the case of the Philippines, the pace of its development is surmisable from its dismal employment situation, and vice versa. Based on the National Statistics Office’s January round of labor survey, about three and a half million Filipinos are unemployed. This translates to 10.6% of the country’s thirty-four million labor force. This does not even count underemployment or instances when a person is considered only partially employed.

The adverse labor situation is traceable to the fact that the country’s manufacturing sector has, for the past years, been contributing negatively to net job creation as some businesses have gone bankrupt or decided to downsize or right-size. Likewise, the net growth in employment in the agriculture and services sectors, although positive, are found wanting.

What is actually happening is that the economy’s job generation capabilities across all sectors cannot pick up with the growth in the annual additions to the country’s labor force. The labor supply just grows at a much faster pace the way the Filipino population outgrows the country’s economic resources.

Government as Employment Facilitator
The Arroyo administration has always included job creation as one of its centerpiece programs. President Arroyo even established under the Office of the President the Million Jobs Program with the goal of building jobs specifically in the agriculture sector. Then-Presidential Adviser and now Agriculture Secretary Cito Lorenzo pursued the mandate of the said program by coordinating with the association of agriculture industries and also by spearheading hybrid rice and corn programs.

Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), under the leadership of Sec. Patricia Sto. Tomas, launched several job fairs and a job search portal which facilitated jobs and skills matching. Through its instrument, PhilJobNet, DOLE is able to encourage employers to enroll their firm’s vacancies – all for free. At least 10,000 commercial vacancies are being posted in the website daily and comprises professional (e.g. accountants, engineers, and computer programmers) and blue collar (e.g. seamstresses and drivers) job openings. Still, there is a mismatch in terms of job openings and competencies, since most of the available jobs have high demands for technical expertise. With the current need for more labor-intensive jobs for the country’s unemployed, government finds it hard to provide sufficient matches.

The recently concluded Kabuhayan 2003 Action Center in April this year generated 13,175 registered job applicants. Only 800 applicants were directly hired, while the rest were referred to various companies, recruited for apprentice work, or provided with microfinance assistance. Another event that should not go unnoticed is the OFW Trade Conference and Exhibit in May which provided investment options for overseas Filipino workers and their families.

A National Summit on Labor carried out in 2002, also under the auspices of DOLE, tackled various issues on the sector but had for its principal agenda the generation of commitment of business groups in boosting its member-companies’ job generation capabilities. Note that with the government losing its ability to build employment within the bureaucracy given the looming fiscal deficit, it has taken on the role of employment facilitator assisting employees and private businesses in forging mutually beneficial relationships.

Job-Saving Efforts
Aside from job facilitation, DOLE has also focused on jobs preservation through its proactive stance in labor mediation, acting as the middleman in the negotiations between labor unions and employers. The so-called quick reaction teams (QRTs) are set up in DOLE Regional Offices to arbitrate cases of labor unrest, as well as to help retrenched employees deal with the situation and eventually move on and find gainful employment elsewhere.

Given the positive correlation between trade and industry policies and the number and type of jobs the economy produces, even Department of Trade and Industry Secretary Mar Roxas has taken on an active role in ensuring that our progress in job creation is not eroded by a stand-off in labor negotiations by mediating between labor unions and employer-firms which happen to be foreign locators, whose entry in the country plays an important role in alleviating the current unemployment situation.

Overseas Front
Like the case in the preceding administrations, the government has also continued to look to overseas employment as an answer to local unemployment. Overseas contract workers brave wars and disasters to man their jobs overseas. OFWs not only bring in dollars but also lessen the headcount of frantic job seekers here.

For this year, the government aims to boost employment generation with the overseas labor market figuring in their projection. Out of the lofty three million new jobs target of the government, one million is expected to be generated abroad.

Buyers’ Market
For the longest time, the country’s labor market has always been a “buyers’ market.” There is a yawning gap between job-seekers and job-providers such that one job advertisement is responded to by hundreds of applicants.

The implication of this is that it opens up lots of avenues for abuses of the employer. Labor issues are in the nature of personal safety, just compensation, legality of labor practices, and so on and so forth. As such, more than job facilitation and fostering an environment for economic activities that produce jobs, the government’s role is really to ensure that the labor force is not disadvantaged because in the final analysis, it is the magnitude and quality of positive change that jobs bring to each employee and the economy and society as a whole that will count.