Protest march, job fairs to mark Labor Day
Job seekers line up at a job fair. FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Labor and Employment (Dole) said on Saturday there will be 141,487 local and overseas vacancies to be filled at 26 job fair sites across the country on Labor Day.
“This job fair is one of the employment recovery strategies to restart economic activities, restore consumer and business confidence, upgrade and retool the workforce, and facilitate labor market access,” Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said in a statement.
Labor leader and presidential candidate Leody de Guzman pounced quickly on the absence of any wage policy announcement from Bello and said the quickest way to economic recovery was to put money in workers’ pockets.
De Guzman and his Partido Lakas ng Masa have repeatedly called for an increase in the daily minimum wage to P750 years before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020.
He cited studies suggesting that increased salaries would not lead to the country’s economic downfall, but rather an economic boom.
“With the right amount of salary that our workers will have, our economy will be alive,” he said.
De Guzman lamented that the government even refuses to see the “increased productivity” among workers when they work from home and instead threatened companies with the loss of tax incentives.
De Guzman, also chair of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino, said he would again take to the streets, marching to the Mendiola Bridge in Manila’s San Miguel district, as the labor sector has done in the past.
At the same time on Sunday, however, workers can also check the 26 job fairs around the country to check the vacancies in the manufacturing, business process outsourcing and retail sales sectors, Bello said.
He said 958 employers aim to fill 95,233 local vacancies while 105 recruitment agencies will offer 46,254 jobs in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore.
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