The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has expressed its hopes to create 3.5 million jobs this year to help alleviate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to labor Chief Silvestre Bello III, the initiative is part of the government’s national recovery strategy.
Creation of 3.5 Million Jobs Eyed by Labor Department this 2021
Bello noted that DOLE hoped to provide jobs to 3.5 million Filipinos to stimulate the economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, ABS-CBN News reported.
“This is an all government effort to improve the employment situation in our country. Each government agency has the responsibility to create jobs,” Bello said.
It added that some five million have become jobless due to the pandemic in 2020.
Moreover, the government plans to decrease the unemployment rate this year to the same level of 2019, which averaged at 5.1 percent. This translates to 2.3 million jobless Filipinos.
Bello shared, “We intend to go back to the 2019 unemployment rate para sa gano’n maibalik natin sa trabaho mga around 3.5 million na nawalan ng trabaho o kaya nabawasan ng trabaho.”
Last week, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said the NERS task force had been given a boost by the recent bicameral approval of the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises (CREATE) bill.
The said measure is one of the government’s initiatives to reduce the country’s corporate income tax rate in a bid to attract more foreign investments and help the economy recover from the pandemic.
Lopez explained, “The passing of CREATE will firm up the tax and incentive reforms that will make the investment climate significantly more attractive than the current tax and incentive regime.”
According to Lopez, the CREATE bill will lower the corporate income tax rate to 25 percent for large corporations and 20 percent for micro, small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Bello added that he also proposed a P52-billion budget to subsidize the wages of MSMEs workers for three to six months.
“We hope to retain the status of employment of our workers by about 2 to 3 million,” he said.
Under this proposal, the government will subsidize between 25 to 50 percent of the employees’ salaries so they wouldn’t have to lose their jobs.
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