Villanueva: More jobs created in 2018

Senator Joel Villanueva on Friday welcomed the results of the 2018 Labor Force Survey round conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority which showed that the employment rate of the country has improved to 94.7% in January 2018 from 93.4% in 2017.

"The results of the survey show that increasing employment opportunities in the country is doable. The 1.3% increase of the employment rate from last year is most especially welcome, since our advocacy has been to improve job opportunities for Filipinos," said Villanueva, chair of the Senate committee on labor, employment, and human resources development.

Villanueva also shared that out of the 2.4 million net employment generated in January this year, 841,000 jobs were created in the agriculture sector, 719,000 in the industry sector�mostly from construction with 424,000 jobs and manufacturing with 269,000 while the services sector created 847,000 jobs.

The senator further shared that there is a total of 2.320 million unemployed Filipinos. This accounts for 5.3% improvement from the 6.6% unemployment rate in January 2017.

However, Villanueva noted that there is an increase in underemployment rate to 18% compared to 16.3% from January 2017.

"The 1.7% increase in the underemployment rate shows that there is so much more that needs to be done to improve the quality of jobs to meet the needs of our citizens," Villanueva said. "In the Senate, we already passed on third and final reading Senate Bill No. 1431 or the proposed Tulong Trabaho Act which seeks to narrow the gap of unemployment in the country by providing free tech-voc training and improving the skills of Filipinos who chose not to pursue tertiary education," the senator added.

"We hope that our counterpart in the House of Representatives will soon pass a similar measure which will address job-skills mismatch and guarantee decent jobs for every Filipino," Villanueva concluded.