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Friday, March 29, 2024

House leader: Duterte admin doing ‘good job’ vs. unemployment

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The Duterte administration has done so much to address unemployment, a leader of the House of Representatives said.

Davao City Rep. Karlo Nograles, the panel’s chairperson, made the statement in response to the results of the Philippine Statistics Authority’s January 2018 Labor Force Survey, which shows unemployment rate fell from 6.6 percent during the same period last year to 5.3 percent.

“The reduction of 1.3 percent cannot be underestimated as it represents thousands of Filipinos who now have the ability to put food on the table,” Nograles said.

The January 2018 unemployment rate is even lower than the 5.8 percent posted by the same survey in January 2016, which covered the last full year (2015) of Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, the lawmaker added.

The transition between the Aquino and Duterte administrations took place in mid-2016.

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“By this alone, one can argue that the Duterte government had the better remedy for unemployment when left to its own devices. As such we expect the unemployment rate to drop further as this administration plows on toward its aims of inclusive growth and development,” said Nograles, a presumptive member of the administration’s Senate slate for the 2019 elections.

He said the government’s P8-trillion “Build, Build, Build” program is a surefire job creator since it is focused on the implementation of multiple big tickets infrastructure projects for the rest Duterte’s tenure.

The initiative, which is billed to usher in a “golden age of infrastructure,” began in 2017.

Nograles said the effects of Build, Build, Build is already reflected in the 2018 LFS results, with generated net employment reaching 2.4 million.

“There are 719,000 new jobs recorded for the industry sector, mostly from construction with 424,000 and manufacturing with 269,000,” Nograles noted.

Meanwhile, the agriculture and services sectors alone accounted for over 1.6 million new jobs (841,000 and 847,000, respectively), the PSA study shows.

The total number of employed Filipinos as of January this year was 41.7 million, compared to just 39.3 million in January 2017, the latest LFS result revealed. 

“This is undeniable proof that President Duterte is landing jobs for his countrymen,” Nograles said.

The National Economic Development Authority earlier credited the administration’s aggressive jobs fair campaign and livelihood assistance measures for the improvements in the employment situation.

Meanwhile, the Department of Labor and Employment also revealed late last year that some 125,352 contractual workers have benefitted from Department Order 174″•a directive rooted from President Duterte’s promise to stop contractualization in the Philippines.

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