MOM-AND-POP stores in communities nationwide are the ones creating new job opportunities for Filipinos after the pandemic, but the wages and salaries they offer may not be enough for their daily needs, according to an economist.
In a presentation at the ADR Stratbase Economic Outlook for 2023 virtual forum on Thursday, Ateneo de Manila University Department of Economics Chairperson Alvin P. Ang said these community businesses are all under “Other Services.”
These community services include neighborhood parlors and barber shops, laundry services, funeral services, household repair services, and computer and mobile phone repair services, among others.
“People services like barber shops, laundry services, even funeral services, repairs of goods and computer equipment, among others. So this is really community-based job opportunities that are being generated. But the question is, they may not be quality jobs. Are the wages high enough to sustain increased economic growth?” Ang said.
Citing data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), Ang said these establishments created some 148,000 jobs between December 2021 and March 2022; and another 148,000 jobs in March to June 2022.
More than half or 59.3 percent of these jobs are composed of personal services for wellness, except sports activities; 18.6 percent, laundry services; 9.5 percent, funeral and related services; and 9.4 percent, repair of personal and household goods, among others.
It is possible, Ang told BusinessMirror after the forum, that while these jobs provide salaries to workers consistently, the rates may be below minimum wage. This further limits their financial capability to cope with rising prices.
These kinds of jobs are also the main cause of traffic since these workers need to move from their homes to their places of work. These are the jobs that cannot be done from home, he added.
“These people cannot afford to work from home, they need to move. They have a job but they cannot cope with high prices. In reality, only a few can work from home; they are mostly the ones with high wages,” he pointed out, speaking partly in Filipino.
On Wednesday, BusinessMirror reported that amid the return of the country’s employment data to prepandemic levels, over 400,000 Filipinos became unpaid family workers in December 2022, per data released by the PSA.
The data also showed the number of unpaid family workers rising by 420,000 to 4.28 million in December 2022 from 3.86 million in December 2021.
“The country’s digital transformation is reducing the number of middle-level skilled jobs. Unless you have reached tertiary education, your only option is low-skilled jobs that are quite precarious,” Lanzona said.
Part of what can explain this also, PSA Assistant National Statistician Wilma A. Guillen told the BusinessMirror, are the holidays and Filipinos helping out in family businesses.
It is possible, Guillen said, that Filipinos who went home during the holidays helped out their families.
The data also showed a decline compared to the 4.38 million unpaid family workers in November 2022. National Statistician Claire Dennis S. Mapa said some of these workers may have shifted to other sectors or moved out of the labor force.
Nonetheless, Mapa said careful study is needed to further explain the data. He added that the dataset on unpaid family work was still fresh and has to be analyzed further.