The International Labor Organization employment outlook report released this week see jobs as continuing to be scarce in the Asia-Pacific region that is barely recovering from the loss of 54 million jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“On the surface, employment trends look positive (but) there remain numerous signs that the region’s labor market is not yet back on its precrisis track,” said the ILO, projecting the job gap to rise next year as employment numbers are only 2 percent above 2019 prepandemic figures.
The ILO warned of continued jobs gap of 22 million this year that is “projected to increase again to 26 million in 2023 given the headwinds to growth foreseen in current geopolitical global and regional context.”
In the region where the Philippines is grouped among the lower-middle-income economies with its Southeast Asian neighbors Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar and Timor-Leste, the ILO said information technology and other information services was the region’s fastest growing sector in jobs in the past three decades.
The region’s three largest employment sectors are agriculture, manufacturing and wholesale and retail trade, which accounted for 1.1 billion workers in 2021 or 60 percent of the 1.9 billion workforce. However, ILO said workers in these sectors typically get low wages, poor working conditions and low job and income security.
“The challenge moving forward is to increase and sustain policy attention and public investment to achieve decent work and inclusion in all sectors, especially those where the majority of people work,” ILO senior economist and lead author of the report said.
Employment trends can look positive because of the very low base due to the pandemic, especially in countries like the Philippines that went through ridiculously long lockdown and quarantine periods where millions either lost their jobs outright or were forced to endure underemployment. Getting employment figures back to prepandemic levels will require more than just relaxing mask mandates and avoiding harsh lockdowns, especially if all sectors are to be gainfully employed soon.
This is the job of government and with millions of lives and livelihoods on the line, this is where failure or costlier delays simply cannot be an option.*
