Jobs: More but less

Latest labor and employment data reported by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) generally point to good news, suggesting that things have gotten better on the jobs front. The December jobs data show a record low unemployment rate of 3.1 percent, the lowest I’ve seen since I started watching these numbers four decades ago.

That’s indeed good news. It means fewer Filipino workers are unable to find work, both in percentage terms and in actual numbers. Compared to January 2020 before COVID-19 battered the economy, it’s a marked improvement over the then 5.3 percent unemployment rate representing 2.4 million jobless; now it’s down to 1.6 million.

The underemployed, or those working part-time or even full-time but feeling need for more work, also fell to 11.9 percent of those employed, or 6 million workers, against 14.8 percent or 6.3 million in January 2020. This might suggest that jobs are not only greater in quantity, but also of better quality. But are they really the kind of jobs we want?

Closer examination of data on the employed, unemployed and underemployed reveals the devil in the details. It must be pointed out that in our labor and employment data, many consider the definition of being employed to be quite liberal. A worker only needs to have worked an hour in the week before the survey to be classified as employed. Also considered employed are those not working, but anticipating regular work within two weeks from the date of the survey.

Fellow Inquirer columnist Dr. Mahar Mangahas of Social Weather Stations (SWS) would rather leave the definition of joblessness to the worker. Hence, SWS simply asks their survey respondent if he/she has a job (may trabaho). He explains: “In an SWS survey, being jobless has no reference to time working; it is simply walang trabaho—whatever the respondent considers trabaho, and (is) looking for trabaho.” Joblessness tracked by SWS has always been higher than PSA’s unemployment figure. Dr. Mangahas notes that it is comparable to the sum of PSA’s unemployment and underemployment rates (with the latter stated as a percentage of the labor force, not only of those employed). They regularly compare their joblessness figure with unemployment plus underemployment in PSA’s data, and see a systematic relationship.

Where are the weak spots in the recent jobs data? Here are some key observations:

Wage and salary workers’ share fell significantly. From 65.2 percent of employed workers in January 2020, their share is down to 62.7 percent. The lost share corresponds to 1.3 million wage and salary jobs. These are the better quality jobs that typically include benefits like social security, health insurance, and paid leaves. Instead, what has increased are informal jobs, falling under “individually self-employed” and “unpaid family workers,” whose shares have gone up from 26.2 to 27.4 percent, and 6.2 to 7.8 percent, respectively. These translate to 624,000 and 817,000 added to the ranks of informal workers, respectively, roughly corresponding to the wage and salary jobs missed.

Entrepreneurship has seen significant decline. The “self-employed with employees” category refers to those who employ workers in their own enterprise or farm, and is a good estimate of the number of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the economy. The bad news is that like wage and salary jobs, their share has also dropped, from 2.4 to 2.1 percent, corresponding to 157,000 less MSMEs than could have been had the share been maintained. In fact, there had been a hefty decline in this worker category, which peaked at 1.5 million in mid-2018, dropped to less than half (613,000) during the pandemic (in April 2020), and still remains far below that peak as of last count (1.1 million). In short, we are missing quality employment.

Workers shifted in large numbers to agriculture, where their productivity (and income) is low. Agriculture’s share of total jobs has risen to 24.4 percent of the jobs, against only 22.7 percent in January 2020, while the job shares of both industry and services fell (from 18.8 to 18.3 percent and 58.6 to 57.3 percent, respectively). But more striking is that as the number of underemployed workers in the economy fell by 309,000, those underemployed in agriculture actually swelled by 7,000, with its share to total underemployment rising from 35.9 to 37.8 percent.

Joblessness has risen among the better educated. There is a disturbing rise since January 2020 in the share in total joblessness of those who reached senior high school and college, from 4.6 to 7.5 and 36.9 to 45.9 percent, respectively. In fact, while the jobless declined in numbers in all other education levels, it actually swelled by 24,000 among senior high school graduates.

All told, lower overall joblessness lately is not exactly painting a stronger economy.

cielito.habito@gmail.com