Jobs, jobs, jobs

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The statistics measuring employment and unemployment are often presented to seem better than they really are.

The Washington Post just reported that the US economy shed jobs in July, yet the unemployment rate improved. Some economists say there is a worrying story unfolding behind the numbers.

It seems that even as the US economy lost jobs, American workers left the labor market faster. Stephen Moore, a conservative economist, told WaPo that means there are fewer people looking for jobs. “That’s a big economic story: Where are the workers?”

That shows a weakening in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) that has reached the lowest level since February 2021, during the pandemic.

LFPR counts the persons in the labor force that are either working or looking for a job. A higher rate shows more people are engaging with the job market. A lower rate can signal a weak economy or a discouraged population.

Here in the Philippines, LFPR last June was also recorded lower compared to last year but slightly higher than what was observed in May 2026.

In the US, the share of workers in their “prime working years,” ages 25 to 54, fell sharply between May and June, and only partially recovered in July, leaving economists to fear that young and middle-aged people are abandoning job searches, the WaPo reports. The fear is that discouraged workers are giving up.

Our unemployment rate in June 2026 slightly increased. In terms of magnitude, the number of jobless Pinoys was estimated at 2.59 million in June 2026, higher than the 2.5 million recorded in May 2026 and the 1.95 million posted in June 2025.

Our employment rate in June 2026 was 95.1 percent, lower than the June 2025 employment rate of 96.3 percent. In May 2026, the employment rate was posted at 95.2 percent.

But many people are only technically “employed” based on how employment is measured. A person is considered employed if he works at least one hour a week. That sounds unrealistic but that’s international standard. This brings us to underemployment.

The more significant number measures underemployment. Underemployed persons are employed persons who express the desire to have additional hours of work in their present job, or to have an additional job, or to have a new job with longer hours of work.

While underemployment fluctuates slightly from month to month, recent official data shows a clear upward trend in the number of Filipinos stuck in low-quality work.

In June 2026, the underemployment rate was recorded at 12.1 percent, higher than the 11.4 percent estimate in June 2025, but lower than the rate of 12.2 percent in May 2026.

In terms of magnitude, 6.11 million of the 50.66 million employed Filipinos are underemployed.

These numbers tell us the ability or inability of an economy to create jobs. But how can our economy create the number of jobs our people need when our economic growth, as Sec. Arsi Balisacan described, is so slow?

In the aftermath of the ghost flood control corruption scandal, confidence in our government and its ability to properly run our economy has plummeted. This means job-creating investments are on hold.

The Philippine Statistics Authority said around 650,000 jobseekers sought to enter the workforce for the first time in June, but only about 310,000 found jobs. But the problem extends beyond the number of jobs being created, an economist said, pointing to the high level of informality in the labor market.

“Studies estimate that the percentage of informal workers could go as high as 82 percent of the labor force. That suggests that the overwhelming number of Filipino workers suffer from low wages and low productivity,” Men Sta Ana of the Action for Economic Reforms told BusinessWorld.

In the US, the economic misadventures of the Trump administration and the AI technological transformation killing entry level and many white-collar jobs are behind the problems exposed by their labor statistics.

In our case, it is simply because we have a bad economy. Our government has no clear strategic plan for transforming our economy to a high performing one. DepDev’s Ambisyon 2040 is, in the words of Sta Ana, a statement of aspirations, and is sadly no longer realizable.

Ser Percival Peña-Reyes, a senior research fellow at the Ateneo Center for Economic Research and Development told BusinessWorld the country must rebuild its tradable and industrial base, make infrastructure support economic productivity, improve the transition of young workers from school to employment, address regulatory and competition barriers that keep firms small and ensure that productivity gains translate into higher wages. He also called for preparing the labor market for artificial intelligence and treating regional development as part of the country’s jobs policy.

We have been talking about all those things for as long as I can remember but somehow, we are unable to advance. The failure has led to this punishing scarcity of jobs.

While the US has labor problems of its own, it is rich enough to do something if it wants to. In our case, more and more people just go hungry.

According to the Social Weather Stations, 23.6 percent of families of jobless Filipinos experience involuntary hunger, which is nearly three times higher than the hunger rate among families who have a job or livelihood (8.7 percent).

The 8.7 percent figure comes from the cross-tabulated SWS national survey, where they isolate respondents who are currently employed or have an active livelihood and measure their household hunger rates.

This means that while having a job drastically reduces a family’s risk of hunger, a baseline of nearly one in 11 employed Filipino families still go hungry — primarily due to low daily minimum wages, high inflation and underemployment.

That’s our story.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco.