Signs of potential trouble for PH job market

FEWER Philippine companies are planning to hire new workers in the coming year and that could spell trouble for the country’s unemployment rate.

According to the annual Mercer Total Remuneration Surveys (TRS), only 45 percent of local companies intend to hire new workers in 2020, down from 50 percent this year. The implication of this, according to Mercer, is that salaries will increase at a higher rate than they did this year, by 6.6 percent in 2020 versus 5.5 percent in 2019. But even this bit of good news is not as positive as it sounds at first, once one reads between the lines of the results.