Unbelievable as it is sardonically funny for the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to be bragging that employment is when a Filipino works for at least an hour during the reference period of a survey.
So this is the satire of official pronouncements of glossy unemployment going down by so many percent, when in reality such a pronouncement is based on just an hour of labor by any man, during surveys being conducted.
At least this is what DOLE Undersecretary Carmela Torres admitted during the Senate hearing on its proposed 2025 budget last Thursday in response to the question of Sen. Loren Legarda for DOLE’s definition of an “employed person.”
“If you have worked at least one hour, considered po kayong employed. One hour, at the time of the survey, so ‘yan po yung national definition ng employed,” Torres was quoted by the Philippine Star.
Torres said that this is also the international definition, according to the International Labor Organization. The Philippine Statistics Authority is the agency implementing the survey.
Legarda then clarified if Torres meant an hour in a day, a week or a month and the DOLE official said it was within the “reference period,” but clarified that the duration (of work) is “it depends.”
The ILO defines an employed person as “all persons who worked for pay or profit, or worked as unpaid family workers for at least one hour during the reference week.”
The senators present questioned why the definition was so loose.
The Philippine employment rate was recorded at 96.9 percent as of June 2024, with an unemployment rate of 3.1 percent.
“We feel, when we go out, that the statistics do not align with reality because the international definition is so broad,” Legarda said.
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