THE latest labor force survey encourages officials of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to work even harder in their remaining days in office before the next administration takes over in July.

Labor Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III expressed elation as the latest survey indicates an accelerated momentum of recovery of the labor market.

“These figures encourage us to do more within our remaining days in office and continue our efforts as we transition to a new administration,” he stressed.

Based on the latest labor force survey, the employment rate was placed at 94.2% in March 2022, it was the highest since the pandemic but lower than the registered employment rate in January 2020 at 94.7%.

In March 2021, the employment rate was reported at 92.9 percent.

The unemployment rate also significantly decreased to 5.8% or 2.875M unemployed in March 2022, compared to 6.4% or 3.126M in February 2022.

However, the underemployment rate slightly increased to 15.8% or 7.422 million underemployed workers in March 2022, higher than February 2022 with 14.0% or 6.382 million.

Bello said that during the Labor Day celebration last week, DOLE, as co-chair of the National Employment Recovery Strategy (NERS) Task Force, organized a Job Summit where several initiatives toward job generation were formalized.

He added this includes the partnership with the private sector through the Employers Confederation of the Philippines titled “Beyond 1 Million Jobs: Create. Sustain. Transform.”

The partnership seeks to create more decent, productive, and quality jobs and equip workers with the right skills, competencies, and tools to meet industries’ skills needs.

The DOLE chief said labor sector commitment has also been secured to strengthen and support the NERS.

DOLE will also look into the plan presented by the labor sector, as presented in the Job Summit, and build upon them as deemed feasible.

He cited as another contributing factor the collaboration between the DOLE and the International Labor Organization to improve the safety and health of workers in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the non-metropolitan regions of the country.

“This is also meant to mitigate the negative socioeconomic impact of the COVID-19 crisis through training on occupational safety and health and digitalization of business operations such as digital entrepreneurship, e-commerce strategies, and digital financial literacy through the ‘Building Back Jobs Safely’ project,” Bello said.

“With the pandemic situation now under control, we take this as an advantage to push forward and actively support initiatives towards sustained improvement and recovery of our labor market,” he added.