THE camp of presidential candidate Jejomar Binay on Thursday slammed what it described as the Aquino administration’s failure to provide permanent and quality jobs for the last five years.
Binay’s spokesman Joey Salgado said 3.7 million Filipinos were still unemployed despite the economic growth that the Aquino administration was trumpeting.
“A Binay administration will correct all the government’s mistakes by genuinely providing the Filipinos jobs by focusing on sectors that generate the biggest number of jobs like agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, BPO and exports,” Salgado said.
He said the Aquino administration was boasting about having created millions of jobs, but most of the people who were given jobs were hired on contractual basis, adding there had also been a sharp drop in jobs in the key sectors like manufacturing.
He said that, contrary to the claim of the ruling Liberal Party that its standard bearer Manuel Roxas II was able to generate over four million jobs in the business process outsourcing industry, data showed that the sector employed only one million workers in 2015.
“According to the BPO industry, it employed over one million Filipinos in 2015, so where are the three million?” Salgado said.
“It only employed 101,000 workers in 2004 when then Department of Trade and Industry Secretary Mar Roxas ran for the Senate.
“The manufacturing industry, particularly the textile, wearing apparel and leather industries, meanwhile, hovered at between 800,000 to 900,000 workers from 1999 to 2003. It is down to less than 700,000 workers in 2013.”
Analysts, Salgado said, had noted that the country’s economic growth had yet to generate sizable numbers of new jobs needed to absorb the new entrants into the labor force.
Salgado said that, out of the one million jobs created in 2014, around 700,000 were “vulnerable” or temporary positions.
He said most of the unemployed were young workers, and of the unemployed, 48 percent or 1.8 million Filipinos were young, aged 15 to 24 years. A further 1.2 million or 32 percent were aged 25 to 34.
Another seven million Filipinos were underemployed in 2015, up slightly from 2014’s 6.8 million Filipinos, Salgado said.
He said a Binay administration would focus on the sectors generating the biggest number of jobs like agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, business process outsourcing and export.
