Jobs for the future
THE Mindanao Development Authority (Minda) and the World Bank are going to launch the Philippines Mindanao Jobs Report, a press release from Minda said.
The report, it further said, will lay down the strategies for Mindanao Regional Development in generating more jobs for the island.
“This tells a new Mindanao story through the lens of jobs generation, which makes it as a living document of the ways forward to unlock the Mindanao’s potentials through raising farm productivity, improving logistics and connectivity, and developing key ports and other gateways,” Minda Undersecretary Janet Lopoz was quoted as saying.
The press release, however, did not say when the launching will be, but we are looking forward to it, especially with how trends in world employment are taking.
In the World Employment Social Outlook Trends 2018 by the International Labour Organization released just last January 2018, it noted that vulnerable employment is on the rise. Workers in vulnerable employment are the own-account workers, freelancers, and contributing family workers, who because of their status are less likely to have formal work arrangements and in effect will lack decent working conditions, social security, and proper representation to haggle for better pay. As such, vulnerable employment is associated with lower pay and difficult conditions of work.
It is vulnerable employment that is eating into the gains of global unemployment reduction.
“Globally, the significant progress achieved in the past in reducing vulnerable employment has essentially stalled since 2012. In 2017, around 42 per cent of workers (or 1.4 billion) worldwide are estimated to be in vulnerable forms of employment, while this share is expected to remain particularly high in developing and emerging countries, at above 76 per cent and 46 per cent, respectively. Worryingly, the current projection suggests that the trend is set to reverse, with the number of people in vulnerable employment projected to increase by 17 million per year in 2018 and 2019,” the ILO report said.
With a study focused on Mindanao, we are hoping that it will draw a real picture of the job opportunities and market in Mindanao so that corresponding actions and policies can be taken by local governments, industry and service sectors, and even the academe.
We’ve been operating for decades without much idea of how the labor and employment side of the picture looks like, it’s about time that such a report comes out and will hopefully regularly come out for updates and developments. With such a regular publication, extrapolations can also be made based on other economic figures to draw a clearer picture of how development or underdevelopment is taking its toll on the people and their potential for productivity.