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[av_heading heading=’Youth unemployment, a scourge of neoliberalism’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY BENJIE OLIVEROS
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Monday, February 6, 2017
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ONE MAJOR issue that the Duterte administration has to address is youth unemployment. The government’s National Economic Development Authority is alarmed at the high unemployment rate of the youth. According to the Labor Force Survey, 50.1 percent of the 2.594 million unemployed people, in April 2016, are from the youth, comprising the 15 to 24 age group. This translates to 1.3 million unemployed youth.
The ratio of the unemployed youth to the total labor force stood at 14.6 percent, more than twice the 6.1 percent national unemployment rate. Added to this, 23.8 percent of the young working population was neither in school nor in the labor force. As such, around 4.7 million young Filipinos are underutilized.
The previous Aquino government attributed the high unemployment rate, especially among the youth, to a so-called skills-job mismatch. To address this, Aquino rushed the implementation of its K+12 program, which added two years to secondary education. The last two years, Senior High School, are supposed to prepare the youth for employment. Thus, a recently opened school, which caters to senior high school students, boasts of a curriculum that is tailor fit to the job needs of corporations.
For example, if banks ask for bank tellers or employees who process loans, this track would be offered to students who would be taught the skills needed for bank tellers or in the processing of loans. The same would be done for Business Process Outsourcing companies, which claim that they constantly need to recruit and hire call center agents, accounting clerks, for medical transcriptions, telemarketing and the like.
Logical? Well it appears to be, but the problem is much more complicated than that.
First, teaching the youth a specific set of skills may facilitate their employment in the short term. But it develops them along a very specific set of skills, which would not prepare them for employment elsewhere when the need for the specific line of work they were trained for decreases. Also, it would limit their social mobility, as they would not be prepared for higher responsibilities and more complicated tasks.
Second, this does not provide for their whole-rounded development, including the ability for critical thinking, a sense of the nation’s history and value, and appreciation for the culture and the arts. They would be trained merely to provide cheap labor for companies.
Third, and the most important, the solution of the previous Aquino administration to the problem of youth unemployment is too simplistic.
The problem of youth unemployment is a global phenomenon. Global youth unemployment was estimated at 12.6 percent or around 73 million unemployed young people in 2013. And according to the report Youth Unemployment: A Global Challenge, there has not been much change since 2009, the year the world plunged into a crisis.
According to the same report: “The problem is particularly severe in the Middle East and in North Africa, where youth unemployment currently stands at an estimated 29.6 percent and 23.9 percent, respectively.
Youth unemployment rates are lower in the developed economies (17.5 percent) and in Southeast Asia (13.5 percent), Latin America (13.3 percent), sub-Saharan Africa (11.7 percent), East Asia (10 percent) and South Asia (9.6 percent).” (To be continued) (Bulatlat.com)
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