FILE PHOTO: A man looks at a poster showing the list of jobs for hire. INQUIRER/MARIANNE BERMUDEZ
MANILA, Philippines — About 2.93 million Filipinos were still jobless in January, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported on Friday as it released the results of its latest quarterly labor force survey.
The survey showed that 6.4 percent of the country’s labor force of almost 46 million working-age Filipinos were unemployed in January.
But National Statistician Dennis Mapa said January’s unemployment figures were the lowest since April 2020, when three-fourths of the economy was shut down due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
Malacañang, through Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar, attributed the improvement to the government’s pandemic strategy.
“We attribute the improvement in the employment situation to the effective recalibration of our strategies with the shift to alert level system, and with more parts of the country being classified alert level 1, our economic team estimates 170,000 less unemployed workers over the next quarter,” Andanar said in a statement.
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