Trickery with unemployment statistics
The government boasts that from October 2000 to October 2001, 2.3 million new jobs were created. Thus, the unemployment rate supposedly decreased from 10.1% to 9.8%.
It is important to make an in-depth analysis of the data behind these statistics in order to distinguish between the apparent improvement in employment and the reality of the worsening supply of substantial employment in the country.
Firstly, more than 80% of those supposedly newly employed are in the agricultural (900,000) and service (1.2 million) sectors. Only around 237,000 are in the industrial sector. Industry's share in total employment has decreased from 16% to 15.6%. In fact, up to 111,080 workers have been retrenched from the private sector from January to October 2001-more than half (50.9%) of them permanently, while 49.1% were placed on job rotation.
The further increase in "employment" in the agriculture and service sectors coupled with reduced employment in the industrial sector emphasize the backward agrarian character of the economy and the lack of a stable industrial sector in the country. This is in fact ironic, because for so long as no genuine industries exist in the country, the capacity of the agricultural and service sectors to create genuine employment cannot be increased.
Of the 2.3 million who supposedly have new jobs, 739,000 are unpaid family workers and 1.2 million are own-account workers (who are self-employed and mostly hold irregular jobs)!
The government's own statistics show that the two million net increase in employment refers to the large-scale replacement of former fulltime workers with casual workers due to "labor flexibility", "casualization", "labor only contracting" and other anti-labor schemes of capitalists and government. There are 2.8 new casuals, contractuals, apprentices and other part-time workers, while 757,000 fulltime workers were booted out of their jobs. Workers are decreasing in number while the ranks of the semiproletariat are fast increasing. In reality, most of the "newly created jobs" are unstable, inconsequential and can usually be found on the fringes of the economy. With 10.9 million of them, part-time workers -who are actually semiproletariat- now comprise more than 37% of the country's total employment.
All this highlights the largely unindustrial, irrelevant and temporary character of the employment being created by the Philippines' semicolonial and semifeudal economy. This is a basic indicator of the continuing and worsening backwardness of the Philippine economy.
The economy's continuing crisis-stricken state, the absence of a national industry and plummeting production will wreak nothing but the continued and further reduction of meaningful employment in the country.
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