Forty-two percent of non-home based Filipino workers found it hard to travel to work amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with 44 percent of the respondents opting to walk from their homes to their workplaces, a latest Social Weather Survey (SWS) report released Friday said.
The non-commissioned survey showed that 82 percent of the 1,500 working respondents are reporting to their workplaces and only 18 percent were home-based.
Of the non-home-based workers, 42 percent said it was “very much harder” to travel to work compared to the pre-COVID-19 pandemic times; 19 percent found it “somewhat much harder,” and 11 percent said it was “slightly harder” now.
Twenty-eight percent of the respondents said traveling to work was just the same as before.
It was also found that 44 percent of the non-home-based workers walked to their workplaces after the respondents were asked about their means of transportation amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Other means of transportation used by the workers were motorcycles (24 percent), tricycles (14 percent), jeepneys or multi-cabs (8 percent), bicycles (5 percent), buses (3 percent), private cars (3 percent), and motorboats or banca (1 percent).
The survey was conducted from 21 to 24 of November 2020 where the lockdown classification was relaxed either to general community quarantine (GCQ) or modified (MGCQ).
The respondents were composed of 600 workers in Balance Luzon and 300 each in Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao.
The SWS survey release followed official reports that the unemployment rate declined to 7.1 percent in March, the lowest since the height of the enhanced community quarantine in April 2020 which the government enforced to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippine Statistics Authority said Thursday.
Data from the PSA showed that unemployment rate eased from 8.8 percent in February and 8.7 percent in January.
It did not provide data on year-on-year comparison.
It said the number of unemployed Filipinos 15 years and over in March was estimated at 3.44 million, a reduction of about 747,000 unemployed persons from February 2021.
Employment rate rose to 92.9 percent in March from 91.2 percent in February.
This translated into a month-on-month increase of about 2.18 million Filipinos who had job or business to 45.33 million in March from 43.15 million in February.
Underemployment rate also fell to 16.2 percent in March from 18.2 percent in February.
In terms of magnitude, about 7.34 million of the employed persons expressed the desire to have additional hours of work in their present job or to have additional job, or to have a new job with longer hours of work in March 2021.
Economic managers led by Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III, Economic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua and Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado said the labor market continued to see gains in March following the further reopening of the economy, while adhering to the minimum health standards.
“Rising labor force participation and falling unemployment have enabled millions of Filipinos to regain their jobs and incomes in March 2021,” they said in a joint statement.
Following the second spike in COVID-19 infections in the latter half of March, the government again prioritized saving lives using the ECQ and modified ECQ period to further improve the health system capacity.
The sampling error margins for the said survey are ±2.5 percent for national percentages, ±4 percent for Balance Luzon, and ±6 percent for Metro Manila, the Visayas, and Mindanao.
The SWS said the area estimates were weighted by the Philippine Statistics Authority's medium-population projections for 2020 to obtain the national estimates.