The Department of Trade and Industry hopes to bring back soon the more than 300,000 people employed in cinemas and other related industries who were temporarily retrenched during the height of the pandemic.
Trade secretary Ramon Lopez said the reopening of theaters, cinemas and other industries like driving schools, video and interactive game arcades, libraries, archives, museums, cultural centers, meetings, incentives, conferences, exhibitions and limited social events of establishments would hasten the re-employment of workers directly and indirectly employed in the entertainment industry.
“Cinemas in MGCQ areas have been opened already. So it’s the approximately half of the economy that is still in GCQ where cinemas will be opened,” Lopez said over the weekend.
Meanwhile, the Labor department has renewed its bid to free more than half a million children who are into child labor and its worst forms amid reports that cases of child labor spiked despite the restrictions due to the pandemic.
Maria Karina Trayvilla, director of the Bureau of Workers with Special Concerns, said while the department had yet to receive the latest official data on the number of young Filipinos engaged in child labor, the government was nonetheless bent on removing about 630,000 of them from such condition by 2022.
“We understand that one of the root causes of child labor is poverty, but we are doubling our efforts to eliminate this. We have encountered difficulties in the implementation of the program due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but now we are ready to intensify the profiling of children in the country,” Trayvilla said.
Areas in general community quarantine may soon start allowing cinemas to open at 50 percent capacity while modified general community quarantine areas have allowed cinemas to open at 75 percent capacity.
Lopez noted the technical working group of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases had reviewed the new directive in consultation with the DTI, Department of Health, Department of Labor and Employment, Department of Tourism, Department of Interior and Local Government and the Department of Finance.
The IATF also required cinema owners and operators for extra safety protocols such as ventilation, he said.
The cinemas and allied industries, Lopez said, had more or less 300,000 workers before the pandemic struck. The entertainment industry including film production and cinemas were valued at P13 billion.
“But the pandemic had greatly reduced this to P1.3 billion in 2020,” he said.