Still much work to do in putting Filipinos to work

MORE than one-fifth of those who are willing and able to work in the Philippines were unemployed in 2016, the latest survey by Social Weather Stations (SWS) said on Friday.

As has always been the case, the SWS survey results stand in stark contrast to the much rosier picture painted by the official employment statistics compiled by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), which reported that the full-year jobless rate in 2016 was 5.5 percent. That represented a significant improvement from 2015, when the unemployment rate was 6.3 percent. By contrast, the SWS result for 2016 showed the country’s employment situation had gotten slightly worse from a year earlier; the 2015 survey put the jobless rate at 21.9 percent.