| Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash
Results of the most recent Labor Force Survey (LFS) showed that employed Filipinos increased to 48.07 million, an improvement over 44.63 million in July and 47.87 million persons with jobs or livelihoods in August 2022.
Overall, the number of persons employed by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) increased in August. However, the quality of employment could have been higher.
It increased the number of self-employed and unpaid family workers, which saw significant increases against the increase in wage and salary workers. It translates to a whopping employment rate of 95.6%, higher than the 95.2% rate in July and the 94.7% in the same period last year.
During this period, the increase in wages and salary of workers was slight. There was a massive increase in self-employed and unpaid family workers. In particular, unpaid family workers grew to 3.84 million in August from 1.99 million in July. Unpaid family workers account for 8% of the total employed. And are these individuals counted as employed?
The PSA defines an unpaid family worker as someone who works without pay on his family-operated farm or business by another member living in the same household. It is, at best, creative math. 1 + 1 = 4 ? Filipino families are culturally multi-generational. Is a family member who would do some floor sweeping or dishwashing in a family-owned carinderia fully employed?
On the other hand, self-employed individuals increased to 13.14 million from 11.25 million in July. The workers group accounts for 27.3% of the total employed.
Wage and salary workers, which account for 62.6% of the total employed, marginally rose to 30.07 million from 29.99 million in the prior month. In addition, middle- and high-skilled occupations decreased by 354,000, while low-skilled occupations increased by 551,000 year-on-year.
As published in local interviews, the economic think tank IBON Foundation characterized the “millions-surge” in informal work, “particularly in part-time and unpaid family, indicates that working Filipinos are going into survival mode as the living crisis intensifies.”
The think tank said that while employment increased by 3.4 million to over 48 million month-on-month, the jobs created mainly were “precarious work.” IBON further declared, “This does not yet include irregular workers in private establishments who should be considered informally employed. Including them possibly increases informality to as much as 34.5 million or an overwhelming 72% of total employment.”
National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Secretary Arsenio Balisacan also said the government is committed to “creating high-quality jobs, jobs that give everyone a decent pay.”
While the transparency is commendable, the headlines are misleading. There is also a need for more clarity regarding the percentage of workers in minimum-wage jobs – there are certainly a significant number of those. Why else would teachers, midwives, and other professionals work as domestic household workers abroad?
” …reported unemployment numbers must be adequate, complete, and conclusive. It can’t be said that the unemployment numbers were someone’s imagination because there is no proof. The data suggests more work needs to be done by the government to overcome the lingering lack of employment. There is also a need to categorize employment income better to ascertain employment quality.”
The employment numbers also NEVER account for the 10-12 million Filipinos abroad who would likely be unemployed if they repatriated to the Philippines. It gets better. Many overseas Filipinos, sorry for the lack of official statistics, apparently these facts are not being tracked, provide capital to many family businesses back in the Philippines. Relatives are probably among the ’employees’ of these businesses – now counted as unpaid family members and counted as employed.
Every overseas Filipino who buys a condominium or builds a home in the Philippines provides at least some form of employment to construction workers, architects, engineers, developers, and sales agents, also known as realtors.
In turn, this creates profits for the giant conglomerates in the Philippines. The stock price of these conglomerates depends on these profits, which in turn, at least partially, fund the most significant retirement accounts of private and public pensions.
Counting the overseas Filipino plus 3-4 dependents back in the Philippines, conservatively, and some of these relatives working in a family business financed by that overseas Filipino, how many jobs is the Philippine government really responsible for creating?
Remittances, specifically bank remittances, from overseas Filipinos rank the Philippines 4th in the world, behind India, Mexico, and China. India and China have populations in the billions, and Mexico bordering the United States, all understandably have higher remittances. The Philippines, however, ranks so high not because of those reasons but simply because there isn’t enough income being generated organically that it’s growing ever dependent on remittances. This writer still needs to understand why the Philippine Central Bank consistently excludes ‘cash’ remittances in this calculation just because the remittance came in the form of cash brought by returning Filipinos on their person as they arrived as Balikbayan. Another attempt at economic data manipulation?
It reminds me of how immunization data was reported in the municipality where I used to work as a health center physician. The staff looks up as if begging for forgiveness as they ‘guesstimate’ the number of immunizations for the quarter. That had to change quickly.
In summary, reported unemployment numbers must be adequate, complete, and conclusive. It can’t be said that the unemployment numbers were someone’s imagination because there is no proof. The data suggests more work needs to be done by the government to overcome the lingering lack of employment. There is also a need to categorize employment income better to ascertain employment quality.
Only recently, with international interventions in the form of transformative grants and loans that seek to address governance and corruption, was data readily available. The Philippines has more transformative change on its road to self-awareness, and data is a perfect place to start. More data, not less data.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Crispin Fernandez advocates for overseas Filipinos, public health, transformative political change, and patriotic economics. He is also a community organizer, leader, and freelance writer.
