In its slogan, ?Statistics for Advocacy,? Social Weather Stations is referring to scientific advocacy, not propaganda-oriented advocacy.
SWS is a non-stock, non-profit research institute?not a ?firm? or a ?company??engaged in scientific work, not public relations. Its mission is to generate high-quality survey data for the education and use of social scientists in particular, and the public in general, in promoting meaningful development in the country.
The core SWS indicators. SWS doesn?t know what the findings will be until after a survey is done. What it does determine is the survey agenda. In particular, its policy is to measure certain core indicators each quarter, including: poverty, hunger, perceived past/future trends in personal quality of life, public satisfaction with the performance of top officials (the president, vice president, Senate president, speaker, and chief justice) and institutions (the ?national administration,? the Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court, and the Cabinet as a whole, and victimization of households by common crimes (home break-in, theft/robbery outside the home, ?carnapping,? and physical violence).
Such indicators are not paid for by anyone; their costs are effectively shouldered by the sponsors of other items in the Social Weather Survey, which is a national survey omnibus, in much the same way that the costs of a broadsheet?s news are in effect shouldered by its advertisers.
The definitions of the core indicators are kept unchanged, so that comparisons over time will be valid. Updated results are regularly released to the public, whether favorable or unfavorable to the administration, to the opposition, or to any other group.
SWS has no intention of springing surprises on the government. This is avoided now that first-printing rights to many indicators have been assigned to BusinessWorld (BW), which gets immediate reactions from government and other sectors, and publishes them simultaneously.
Last March 30th, we visited National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Director-General Ralph Recto for the specific purpose of showing him, confidentially, our record-high 34.2 percent unemployment rate for February 2009, which BW published last Monday; there is a photo in the SWS website. Secretary Recto found it very pertinent to his proposal for unemployment insurance.
Tracking unemployment. The SWS survey question on employment is: ?Are you working at present, not working but used to, or have you never worked?? For this simple question, the time reference is whatever is commonly understood by the Filipino phrase ?sa kasalukuyan.? Then those presently not working are asked if they are looking for work or else planning to establish a business; those saying Yes are the unemployed.
With these two questions, unchanged since September 1993, SWS has surveyed unemployment 63 times. In 48 surveys from 1993 up to March 2005, unemployment ranged between 5.4 and 19.0 percent. In 25 of those surveys it was in single digits, and in 23 it was in double digits. So there was no special tendency for the methodology to produce overly high unemployment rates. On many occasions, in fact, the SWS unemployment rate was lower than the official rate. (Note: the SWS surveys cover the population 18 years old and up, whereas the official Labor Force Surveys [LFS] cover people 15 years old and up.)
The SWS unemployment percentage reached the 20s for the first time (20.3) in May 2005. In 15 surveys from May 2005 to February 2009, the percentage was below 20 only twice, and was at least 30 four times. In other words, the SWS surveys have been signaling severe unemployment for the past several years already.
The official LFS, for its part, asks a number of questions to determine employment. The first is: ?Did __ do any work at all even for only one hour [emphasis mine?MM] during the past week?? This strikes me, incidentally, as an unreasonably low threshold for graduating people into the ranks of the employed. How many people, without a regular job, can afford to pass up every opportunity to earn something?
If the one-hour-a-week rule doesn?t succeed in classifying a person as ?employed,? the LFS? second question is: ?Although __ did not work, did __ have a job or business during the past week?? The LFS Technical Notes list the following as cases of people employed yet not being at work: ?an employee on strike; a person temporarily laid off due to non-economic reasons like machine breakdown; a person with a new job to begin within two weeks from the date of interview; regular and temporary teachers, excluding substitutes, during summer vacation who still receive pay and expect to go back to their jobs in the next school year.? Deliberate probing into such cases will result in classifying more respondents as employed.
The LFS? third question, directed to those still unclassified as working, is: ?Did __ look for work at any time during the past week?? Those who did look are called unemployed; those who didn?t look are asked a fourth question: ?Why did __ not look for work?? Those whose reasons for not looking are considered invalid (belief that work isn?t available, temporary illness/disability, bad weather, a job application is pending, awaiting a job interview) are supposed to be classified as unemployed.
Starting April 2005, the LFS added ?available? to ?not working? and ?looking? as a necessary condition for being unemployed. This means that those looking for work but who cannot accept a job now, if an opening materializes, are not considered unemployed. The new SWS report says that unemployment becomes 25.9 percent if the unavailable are excluded.
* * *
Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
