Job fairs not the solution to unemployment

By NUSP-BB PR

BAGUIO CITY — Progressive youth groups here in the Cordillera criticized the Aquino administration today for ‘Noynoying’ on the issue of college graduates’ unemployment, with the government again resorting to job fairs to give the impression that it is actually doing something.

In a repeat of graduation seasons in previous years, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) is again hyping-up job fairs as its way of providing employment for the estimated 517,000 students who will graduate from college this March.

Ivan Labayne, chairperson of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines Baguio Benguet (CEGP-BB) says that “In the case of the region, BPO’s absorbs the majority of the 14,000 graduates that the region produces. Mostly graduates become victims of contractualization in call centers and other jobs like fly by night tutorial schools and online writing centers.”

He adds that as fresh graduates, they face disadvantages in looking for job opportunities for their lack of experience.

Labayne also adds that in the city’s Export Processing Zone majority of companies are call centers, which 80% of the employees are young people.

“Graduates of previous years will attest to how only a few dozen applicants are accepted out of the tens of thousands who troop to each job fair. Like just about anything being done by Noynoy, this is just meant to give the impression that the government is doing something,” said Tracy Dumalo, spokesperson of Anakbayan Cordillera.

She cited a study by the think-tank IBON Foundation which revealed that 86% of the 1.1 million jobs generated in Aquino’s first year are part time jobs, with 31.7% of the said jobs coming from the so-called ‘informal sector’, such as vendors, while 26.7% come from agriculture.

More revealing of the government’s failure to generate jobs is last month’s SWS survey which showed that 9.7 million Filipinos are now unemployed. In the 18-24 years old bracket, joblessness rose from 46% to 49%.

Meanwhile Cielo Marie Bayson, coordinator of the National Union of Students of the Philippines Baguio Benguet (NUSP-BB) disputed the phenomenon of ‘job mismatch’, saying the term was coined to disguise the government’s lack of a meaningful national economic development plan.

“We have hundreds of thousands of unemployed nurses and engineers. But on the other hand, many rural areas still lack basic health services, and our country’s level of technological level is still very low. It is misleading to say that our graduates do not possess the skills relevant to today’s economy. The truth is, the government is squandering the talents of the youth today which could have been used in nation-building,” says Bayson. # nordis.net