"What official optimism in the face of stark and disheartening reality."
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
The quote, from a play by Oscar Wilde, seems a rather appropriate way to describe our lot, given the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic devastation it has wrought.
This week, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that 4 million Filipinos were jobless in January, with the unemployment rate hitting a 16-year high.
Yet, Labor and Employment Secretary Silvestre Bello III said the “positive numbers” in the latest PSA Labor Force Survey showed that companies and employees are gaining confidence with the slowly reopening economy.
“The results of the January 2021 Labor Force Survey is highly encouraging with a 1.6 million increase in the country’s labor force, and 1.4 million workers who had regained employment,” he added.
For the record, the PSA survey in January showed that the unemployment rate worsened to 8.7 percent from 5.3 percent a year ago.
The national statistician, Dennis Mapa, said the jobless rate was the highest since 2005 when the government adopted its current employment metrics. The actual number of Filipinos without jobs rose to 4 million, from 2.4 million in January 2020.
To put a positive spin on these patently discouraging figures, the Labor secretary compared the January 2021 numbers to those in October 2020, when the country was at the tail-end of one of the world’s longest lockdowns.
Using the same yardstick, January’s unemployment actually matched the 8.7 percent in October 2020—but the number of jobless people was lower, at 3.8 million, back then because as Mr. Bello observes, the labor force grew by 1.6 million.
This expansion, in itself, is nothing to crow about, however. It just means there were more Filipinos who became economically active when they reached the age of 15 in January. Viewed from another perspective, that meant there were 45.2 million Filipinos looking for employment in January, up from 43.6 million in October 2020. In both instances, 8.7 percent of them did not find the jobs.
Still, there was no tamping down Mr. Bello’s optimism.
“We expect a better and more improved employment performance in the coming months with the vaccine being made available and more Filipinos under the priority categories getting inoculated,” he said in a statement.
Now, about that.
A year into the pandemic, the Palace said the government’s response to the crisis has been “excellent.”
“We were excellent. We controlled the spread of the disease, especially when compared to richer countries with more modern hospitals,” said presidential spokesman Harry Roque on Monday.
His basis of comparison, of course, was the United States, where the dismal response by the brain-dead and now deposed Trump administration has resulted in more than half a million dead Americans.
The Palace spokesman crowed that the Philippines is not even in the top five, 10 or 20 in terms of COVID-19 infections in the world.
Mr. Roque neglects to point out that by World Health Organization (WHO) standards, the Philippines on Monday had the highest number of COVID-19 infections in the Western Pacific and also the highest death toll from the disease, higher than Japan or China.
Such official optimism in the face of our stark and disheartening reality calls to mind the iconic scene in the 1979 comedy classic The Life of Brian, in which a man crucified by the Romans advises in song the main character who is on the cross next to him to “always look on the bright side of life.”
We’d whistle along, too, if only our “crucifixion” were not so painful—and so likely to result in death.
