STRAIGHT FROM THE BIG CITY

Defining under- employment
by Ike Señeres

As it is supposed to be originally defined, under-employment is supposed to occur when people take on jobs that are way below their actual training or experience. For example, a person who is trained to work as a programmer who ends up working as a janitor should be considered as under-employed, even if he usually works eight hours a day.

As it is generally understood now in the Philippines however, under-employment occurs when a person works below eight hours a day, regardless of whether his qualifications are properly matched with his training or not.

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In trying to analyze and compare the differences between these two interpretations, we would arrive at the conclusion that the quantitative perspective predominates in this country in relation to the number of hours a person would work, rather than the qualitative perspective wherein a person is supposed to work in a job where he is most productive, that being his actual preparation. Without so much thinking therefore, we could conclude that due to this mismatch, our national productivity already suffers.

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As it is now, it appears that the government method of measuring the unemployment rate is already defective and misleading. For one, the government lumps together the self-employed, the under-employed, the semi-employed and the fully employed into one cluster, in a way polluting the data as to how many people are actually working productively.

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By itself, it is really difficult to ascertain and measure who are actually self-employed, because there is no standard method right now for doing this. For that matter, there is no procedure for anyone to come forward in order to declare him or her as self-employed, so that he or she or everyone like them could be removed from the statistics of the unemployed.

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In a manner of speaking, those who are supposed to be self-employed are actually owners or operators of small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs), except that there is also no standard method of ascertaining or counting who these people are. For practical purposes, it could be done by counting the number of people who apply for business permits, but we know for a fact that not all SME owners are inclined to apply for permits.

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Given the lack of a method to ascertain and measure who really are the owners or operators of SMEs, we could perhaps say that the government is simply estimating the numbers of those who are supposed to be self-employed as individual entrepreneurs, meaning to say that actual employment rate could even be more polluted as we already suspect.

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At the risk of making too much of a sweeping statement, I would say that all contractual workers are practically under-employed, for reasons of their time working or their skills being properly matched. In my day to day work at the Inter-Charity Network, I encounter people who are so sick and tired of working for only five months at the time, under the threat of being jobless again in the near future if they could not find another job when their time is up.

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It appears that the workers who are being subjected to this contractual tyranny have now emerged as a sub-culture, and have even come up with the slang word “endo” to refer to their status of being terminated at the end of their contract. At this time and age wherein “Human Security” has become a top priority of the United Nations, it is sad to say that our own countrymen here are not secure about their job status right here where they live.

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Is the government ever going to correct the wrong interpretation of the under-employed status in order to put the employment rate data into the proper order? Hopefully so, but right now, it appears that this problem is not even in the consciousness of our national leaders. The angle of productivity is another concern that has apparently not entered the consciousness of our leaders as well, even if it is obvious that if the skills of people are mismatched, they will never become as productive as they should be.

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As it is now, it is sad to say that the “endo” problem has become widely accepted by both employers and employees alike, as if it is already part of our culture and national life. Are we just going to live with this reality, or are we going to do something about it, to put it back to the proper order? I hope that this would become an election issue, so that it could end somehow.

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Tune in to "Gulong ng Kabuhayan" on DZXL (558 KHZ) Mon to Fri 6 to 6:45 PM. Join the Inter-Charity Network. We assist you in looking for a job or setting up a small business. Email ike@kaiking.net or text 09175684855.Unit 324, Guadalupe Commercial Complex, EDSA, Makati.