We cannot solve unemployment through job fairs
This government will go down the history as the one that wanted to solve unemployment by merely holding job fairs. We have our highest respect for Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz, and we salute her for her many accomplishments. She is very hard-working, honest, and no-nonsense secretary of labor and employment. Having said that, we just have to point out that one of the failures in the PNoy administration is the inability to make a dent in the very high unemployment and underemployment rates. The Philippines has remained to have the highest of such rates among the ten ASEAN member nations. And worse, we have not seen any viable, coherent, and long-range program to address this serious and far-reaching social malady.
The only recurrent approach that this administration has kept on repeating every Labor Day and every celebration is the holding of job fairs, to the point of "ad infinitum," or "ad nauseam." Such activities definitely do not create new jobs but merely provide a venue and an occasion for the job searchers and the head hunters and recruiters to meet. Big companies and recruitment agencies are being helped by DOLE to scout for, search, interview, test, and evaluate job applicants. These job fairs also help the job applicants to search for and find prospective employers, both in the domestic labor market and abroad. And so, job fairs are nothing but some sort of a supermarket for employees and employers.
Even if the Labor secretary would pressure all the seventeen regional directors and the scores of DOLE provincial officers to hold such job fairs in all fiestas, festivals like the Sinulod, Dinagyang, Ati-Atihan, Kadayaw or Maskara or even during sport provincial, regional, or national competitions, the fact remains that such activities do not create one more job that does not currently exist in the labor markets. These DOLE activities merely facilitate recruitment activities for local employment and for overseas jobs. Unwittingly, the resources of government are being used to make the jobs of human resources managers to undertake their talent acquisition, without having to pay headhunters and local employment agencies.
The recruiters for overseas employment would find in these job fairs a very opportune venue to go about their business of making money, by demanding placement fees for work abroad, many of which jobs are dirty, difficult, dangerous, deceptive and degrading. Even recruiters for qualified marine officers and ratings do find the job fairs as a very effective mechanism for searching, evaluating, and hiring prospective OFWs. But then again, these fairs do not create new jobs, and do not help at all in confronting the socially pernicious problem of unemployment and underemployment.
Tomorrow is Labor Day and our officials again will regal the working class with grand speeches, and with daring claims of accomplishments and draconian promises. But whatever will be said, the sad fact remains that more than seven million workers are jobless totally and more than twelve million underemployed. The sad fact also indicates that more than twelve million Filipinos have to work in more than 180 countries all over the world, and that more than five thousand of our people do leave our country every single day just to find work abroad. And job fairs will not make any difference in the overall scheme of things.
- Latest
