Our 90,000 jobless graduates

Philippine Daily Inquirer

First Posted 05:19:00 03/23/2010

Unemployment awaits many of the new graduates who will be entering the labor force come April. Of the estimated half a million graduates this March, more than 90,000 will not be able to find work despite having invested four or five years and a fortune in a college education. We challenge the presidential aspirants to present a jobs policy that will address the grave problem of unemployment in general and youth joblessness in particular.

The figures cited here are April 2005 unemployment data from the National Statistics Office, showing an 18.5-percent unemployment rate among graduates. Despite possessing a college diploma, graduates are only marginally better off than undergraduates among whom the unemployment rate is 21 percent.

The graduates of 2010 constitute only 12 percent of every 100 children who entered elementary education 14 years ago. Of these 12 percent, seven will take a licensure exam, but only three will pass. Of the three, only one will be able to find a job that befits his educational attainment. The rest will find work that has nothing to do with their course.

However, the latest NSO employment figures propagate myths instead of truths. Unemployment has been kept magically low by removing from the labor force those who have already stopped looking for work and even those who have been looking for work for six months but have not found any. Starting in 2005, by a mere redefinition of terms, one million Filipinos were taken off from unemployment rolls just so the Arroyo administration could claim that unemployment has gone down from the historical average of 10 percent to 7 percent.

The country needs a short-term, massive public employment program and a long-term economic and trade policy reoriented from liberalization to generating decent jobs. The present emergency employment program must not only be made more widespread to employ millions; it should be reformed as well.

People’s organizations, not local politicians, must administer the public employment program so that it will not be used for patronage and so that it will promote decent work instead of contractualization. But a strategic jobs policy demands the political will to reverse liberalization, deregulation and privatization, and to uphold domestic industry and agriculture.

—GERRY RIVERA,

vice chair,

Partido ng Manggagawa,

manggagawa@gmail.com