Think tank: Philippines' quality of work worsening

MANILA, Philippines — The quality of work in the country continues to worsen despite the government's claims that the current administration has brought better job opportunities, a left-learning think tank said.

Research group IBON reported on Monday that job generation under the administration of President Benigno Aquino III is marked with poor quality work.

"The government has been playing up increased employment to showcase the supposed effectiveness of its Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation-induced neoliberal programs such as labor flexibilization and contractualization," IBON said in a report published on Monday.

The report stated that 34.3 percent of all employed persons are own-account workers (26.2 percent or 10.2 million) and unpaid family workers (8.1 percent or 3.2 million) as of July.

Around 544,000 informal jobs were created in the first quarter of the year but 137,000 were lost.

Meanwhile, some 12 million Filipinos are part-time workers who work less than 40 hours.

Labor force figures showed that the underemployed rose from 18.3 percent in July 2014 to 20.8 percent in July this year, according to IBON.

Meanwhile, government data showed that non-regular and agency-hired workers increased from 37 out of 100 Filipino workers in 2008 to 44 of 100 in 2012.

"The share of regular employees to total employment, meanwhile, decreased from 72 to only 56 of 100 Filipino workers," the report stated.

IBON noted that there are at least one million underemployed and at least 1.5 million part-time workers since the beginning of Aquino's administration.

The number of jobless and underemployed Filipinos reached 12.2 million in 2014, the IBON report said.

Contrary to IBON's report, National Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan reported during the recent Philippine Economic Briefing that over four million jobs have been created in the last five years with an increase of wage and salaried employment.

"But the rise of low-paying, insecure jobs under its term has increasingly proven that ordinary Filipinos are not the beneficiaries of Aquino’s brand of governance and economics," IBON said.

A recent report from the Social Weather Stations showed that the country's unemployment rate grew to 23.2 percent in the second quarter of 2015.

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