PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte has urged Congress to give priority to a security of tenure bill following reports that showed the number of unemployed adults rising by more than 1 million, from 6.4 million in January 2017 to 7.5 million in January 2018.
In a statement, Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said that government continues to address and improve the labor situation, including the recent signing of an executive order that bans the “end of contract” or 555 employment scheme used by companies to avoid giving tenure and benefits to their workers.
“While the number of underemployed and part-time workers grew in January 2018 compared to the same period last year, it is noteworthy to mention that the
number of employed persons increased to 41.8 million in January 2018 from 39.3 million in January 2017. Employment rate rose to 94.7 percent in January 2018 from January 2017’s 93.4 percent. Unemployment rate dropped to 5.3 percent in January 2018 from 6.6 percent in January 2017,” Roque said
Based on the latest the Social Weather Stations survey, there were now 10.9 million jobless Filipinos in the country.
“We take note of the latest Social Weather Stations [SWS] survey showing adult joblessness at 23.9 percent in March 2018 compared to 15.7 percent last December 2017,” Roque said.
“We remain optimistic that with the implementation of our Build-Build-Build Infrastructure Plan, we would be able to generate more job opportunities for many of our countrymen,” the Palace official said.
The Palace spokesperson also said the increase in adult joblessness was due to new college graduates looking for jobs as well as seasonal jobs from the Christmas season.
Meanwhile, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines said that while President Duterte signed an executive order, it did not end precarious work arrangements such as Endo and abusive contractualization.
“Nevertheless, we welcome his frank admission as to the limitation of his authority to issue an EO that will curb epidemic scale od abusive contractualization and his directive to certify the security of tenure [SOT] as urgent,” TUCP spokesperson Alan Tanjusay told the Manila Standard.
For his part, Roque said that President Duterte has appealed to Congress to hasten the passage of the security of tenure bill to fully end all forms of contractualization.
The House of Representatives has already passed its own version of the bill but hopes that President Duterte will certify it as urgent so the Senate can act on it immediately.
Senator Francis Escudero, meanwhile, said the government, as the biggest employer of contractual employees, should lead by example and fix the problem of contractualization.
He added that the government should first attend to contract work in the public sector before criticizing the private sector.
“The government is the number one violator. In the Philippines, the government has thd most number of contractual and job orders,” Escudero said.
“Essentially, it would have been nice if the government started it first,” he said about efforts to end contrctualization.