A Local Chief Executive’s Guide to Jobs Creation Atty. Jalilo O. Dela Torre Imagine a neophyte local chief executive, a graduate of a top university, driven by ideals, obsessed by a mission to address grinding poverty in his town, not beholden to any political party, and rues the fact that his term is only for three years because he knows he needs more time for his developmental ideas to bear fruit. From his Masters in Public Administration class, he remembers the first step to be taken is to make a territorial diagnosis. He looks around him, and he sees very little to be optimistic or cheerful about: a rural, agricultural economy producing rice, coconut, some abaca and little else, the best of the town’s men and women having abandoned the town for better jobs and business opportunities elsewhere. The few jobs available are mainly with the local government, the rural bank and the telecommunications company branch, and all are taken. The LGU being second class, most of its income of P70 million are tied up with the town’s payroll, which is bloated with casuals and contractuals of the past administration. He doesn’t see any development prospects, except the magnificent cascading waterfalls in far-away San Juan and the Suhoton caves he used to explore when he was a kid. The thought of developing these two sites occurred to him. Tourism as the driver of the local economy? Probably, but how? His town is off the main highway and unheard of in tourist brochures. How much would be expended until these sites deserve a good mention in travel brochures? What infrastructure facilities need to be laid out and constructed to make it easier for tourists to notice and come? With a little help and imagination, he doesn’t have to give up. We hope this guide might provide some insights and some guidelines for action. With a new administration about to be ushered in, and in many cases, a whole set of new local leaders have been proclaimed and poised to take over the reins of government, the expectation is that employment creation will be on top of the agenda, both at the national and the local level. While unemployment, poverty reduction and jobs creation are “national” issues, it would be shortsighted of the local chief executive to rely totally on the national government for solutions to the unemployment problem because as LCE, he has the mandate, the resources, and hopefully, the will, to make a huge dent on the problem of joblessness and poverty. Jobs aren’t plucked out of thin air; nor are they manufactured ready-to-wear in job fairs. Jobs are created by means of deliberate political and socio-economic policies, decisions and interventions which make the economy more productive, the labor market more efficient and investors more willing to invest. There’s nothing that ought to occupy the new President’s agenda than how to create decent and productive jobs to those already unemployed, the underemployed and to the new entrants to the labor force. We’re talking of at least two million people, tens of thousands in the case of small-sized cities, and unless the President isn’t serious about licking the problem of poverty, he would have to face the issue of where to look for those two million jobs. The local chief executive, with so much less resources to work with, apparently has his job cut out for him. However, using this author’s Focused Targeting and Identification approach, where the jobless are actively sought out, registered and profiled, and provided employment facilitation, training and entrepreneurship options, the work of the LCE becomes achievable. He needs to look at the unemployed as different individuals with different capacities and needs, and each of these can be harnessed and addressed by existing methods, technologies and programs. In general, real jobs are created by increasing an economy’s productive capacity or increasing the productivity of industries and people. Assuming that the increase in output and productivity is brought about by labor-intensive industries and by new technologies which create new demand for labor, economic growth leads to jobs creation and improved standards of living. Through local or foreign investments resulting into agricultural, manufacturing or service businesses being put up, or the application of new technologies which improves or shortens the work processes in these businesses, additional or more skilled manpower will be needed. Labor market inefficiencies, such as those manifested by mismatches in labor supply and demand, are normally addressed by wage differentials, which motivates labor to be mobile, and by merely getting the schools and industry to work together to produce the needed skilled manpower on time and in the right quantity and quality. The reasoning behind the Focused Targeting and Identification approach is that in an increasingly imperfect world, government needs to play Big Brother because not all jobseekers are created equal. Some are graduates of blue-chip colleges and Ivy Leaguers, some come from some honky-tonk university. Some are excellent English speakers, some have difficulty composing two English paragraphs. Some have relevant skills, while some have “general education” backgrounds. Some couldn’t sell a banana fruit, while some have natural entrepreneurial abilities. Policy and program interventions are needed to ensure that the disadvantaged are given as much employment and business opportunities as those in the “mainstream”. Government’s economic and social interventions to create, enhance or preserve jobs are in infrastructure and social services spending, market-oriented human resource development, labor market and institutional efficiencies, promotion and support of new and emerging industries, a favorable business environment, assets reform, redistributive wage policy and policy reforms. Our efforts at job creation therefore should be directed towards the above areas of concern, not in a piecemeal fashion, but altogether in order to maximize the creation of decent and productive jobs. An economy’s ability to generate jobs therefore depends on the following: 1) Government policies which are attractive to investors and friendly to business; 2) The amount and type of infrastructure spending; 3) The amount and extent of social services spending; 4) The quality of and trainability of manpower; 5) A decent wage policy that encourages labor productivity; 6) A physical landscape free of threats to security; 7) A robust agricultural sector, emphasizing the farmer’s freedom to choose the high-value commercial crop suitable to his circumstances; 8) An enabling environment for enterprise development, resulting in a vibrant entrepreneurial sector in the rural areas through the availability of micro-credit; 9) A national program to support new, emerging and resurgent industries, such as ICT-BPO and tourism; 10) A national policy framework for the use of renewable energy to create green jobs; 11) Efficient and responsive labor market mechanisms and institutions 12) A national program for creating and expanding employment and economic opportunities which deliberately targets unemployed youth and other vulnerable sectors as beneficiaries. 13) Full support to cooperatives and other self-help initiatives as an option for employment and incomes creation. Investment-friendly policies A review of the present local and investment policies might be advisable to find out how else we could improve them. Income tax holidays and tax-free importation may not be enough to attract investors because they could obtain these in other more open countries. By and large, the factor which attracts investors most is the quality of our manpower. It is therefore imperative that in reviewing these investment policies, we should involve government agencies which have mandates and expertise on human resource planning and development, such as DOLE, TESDA, CHED and DepEd. For one thing, there should be continuity and consistency of our policies in higher education, basic education, technical vocational education, human resource development and labor, such that we are able to produce manpower in the right quantity and quality as needed by our industries. If I were an ICT-BPO locator, what will I find in this LGU or city which I couldn’t find elsewhere? Are there tax holidays? Is the telecommunications infrastructure of top quality? Is the cost of doing business competitive? Is there a hint of corruption in the way city hall is run? Most importantly, is the supply of quality manpower reliable? The strengths of a city should be highlighted, and that “X” factor should clinch the decision for the locator. In the case of Davao, for example, I think it was the quality of life and the sense of security in the city which made us on top of the list of “next wave cities” in the field of ICT-BPO, not to mention that the ICT-Davao group of Wit Holganza and Bert Barriga (bless his soul) has tirelessly campaigned for the city to be visible on the ICT-BPO map. The DTI’s drive to encourage LGUs to formulate their Local Investments Code may be used as the entry point for the review of local investment policies. Physical and telecommunications infrastructure A physical landscape which boasts of world-class roads, highways, hotels, power, telecommunications bandwidth is a great come-on for investors. DPWH can inventory existing and proposed roads, highways and seaports and other public works and this will be good input to the review process. For example, the Department of Tourism can pinpoint potential tourism sites where infrastructure is inexistent or of poor quality. At the LGU level, where an executive decision has been taken after favorable consultations with the local development council, to push tourism as the town’s economic driver, infrastructure spending decisions must jive with the tourism thrust. The objective is to connect these tourism sites with the main road, invite a few tour operators and let the latter do the marketing for the town. More often, except for the well-heeled types who go to Amanpulo, it’s not world-class quality that most tourists are looking for. It’s simply the availability and affordability of services, like transportation, accommodation, tourist guiding, food service and clean water. The beauty of the site will sell itself to the tourist. In the case of the waterfalls, it’s grand, but when the tourists get there, he has to have some shelter, a bed to rest his tired body and nourishing food and clean water to get him back on the drive. Where heavy investors aren’t available, the town can sell its tourism site as ideal for backpackers and therefore, only minimal infrastructure is needed. The town can invest on a 20-bed bed-and-breakfast facility, or the town’s leading entrepreneurs can co-invest. This will then become the base of all the town’s tourism operations, with safe transportation facilities going to the sites. Tourism can be an iffy proposition: the LCE must make sure the security issues in the area are manageable. In other words, no tourist should be exposed to kidnapping or physical harm. Where security is concerned, the LCE should not compromise on cost. Infrastructure spending packs a hefty jobs-creation horsepower. For example, the P7 billion stimulus package which the government ordered spent on various projects in 2009, hiring 150,000 workers temporarily displaced by the global financial crisis, was a demonstration of how direct interventions for employment creation can really make an impact. The amount constituted only 1.5% of the government’s entire maintenance and operating expenses. One can only imagine the impact if say 20% of the government’s MOOE is reserved for jobs-creating special projects. Infrastructure improves access to goods and services and reduces transport and transaction costs. The construction of roads, bridges, telecommunications bandwidth, power generation facilities and buildings for business, results into real jobs in the construction, rehabilitation and maintenance phases and enables the creation of more jobs through investment decisions made easier by the improved infrastructure. In a study in Indonesia, 2,200 workdays were required to finish one kilometer of road, so theoretically 1,000 kilometers of roads would result into 2.2 million jobs created. Infrastructure projects that have little economic impact but only serve to increase the value of lands of a few people, must be avoided. Infrastructure also increases the productivity and efficiency of economic sectors benefited by the improved infrastructure, which would need more warm bodies, and so on and so forth. Examples, roads from highways to sites with tourism potentials, and farm-to-market roads which encourage more agricultural production and make our farmers more efficient, improving their earning capability, and transporting their produce to markets more quickly, reducing wastage and resulting into savings for producers and consumers. The putting up of IT zones and IT-configured buildings will also attract IT-BPO investors not only from other countries to the Philippines, but from crowded urban centers to new-wave cities and regions, thus diffusing development to the countryside. The reduction of wastage due to improved infrastructure leads to the increase in savings rate, which savings could be used for investments, resulting into more jobs. Infrastructure spending has a geometric way of multiplying the jobs generation capacity of other economic sectors. However, a local chief executive’s flexibility with his budget depends on many things, chiefly whether there are existing obligations which the LGU has to honor in terms of debt servicing. An LCE on the other hand who is not saddled by debt servicing because the past administration had been fiscally prudent would have some wiggle room, and a progressive-minded LCE might want to do away with conventions and do some experimentation with the budget, such as increasing the share of infrastructure so he could pursue the development of his tourism programs. Social services expenditures On the other hand, government spending in social services, such as low-cost housing, education and health, creates jobs in industries which provide these services and also enables a country’s human resources to be physically fit and qualify for jobs, keep and improve their productivity and maintain their savings. Aside from the jobs directly created in hospitals, clinics, schools, and construction, not to mention those in the manufacturing of school supplies and medicines, the importance of social services expenditures is really quantifiable in the quality of an economy’s human resources. How competitive we are in the future will be determined by how much we spend on our children’s education today. Quality of Manpower When education was “trifocalized” in 1994, the objective was that doing so would allow each of the three agencies—DepEd, CHED and TESDA—to each focus on its mandate. But the results have not been satisfactory—each became a kingdom, with its own set of goals and timelines, and its own resources to pursue its mandates. The result—the worsening of the jobs skills mismatch, graduates from the tech-voc and tertiary education system not possessed of the qualifications and skills needed by industry upon graduation. Maybe it’s time to put them back together again, or at the very least, appoint somebody who will be on top of the three, an education czar, if you will. The skills and aptitudes that we need are those which would allow us to compete in the increasingly specialized world market. Our education and training systems must be flexible and quick to respond to new skills demands. This is now the information age, requiring new production technologies, specialized and quick to respond to market signals. Likewise, the skilled manpower that we should be turning out are those that are necessitated by these new technological and work processes, customized to address the needs of the market in real time. Constitutional policies There are also certain policies which probably need to be changed to encourage more investments, such as the ownership and operation of certain kinds of properties and certain kinds of industries being reserved to Filipino nationals. Or they could be national laws or local regulations, or lack of them, which don’t encourage business or investments. This one, however, has to undergo constitutional reforms and therefore since this is long-term the steps leading to constitutional reform must be laid out as early as possible so that the democratic process of debate is ensured. Labor Market Inefficiencies Employment promotion and poverty alleviation, human resources development, migration policies, industrial relations policies, international labor standards, workers’ protection, labor administration and statistics—these are just some of the labor market policies in both supply and demand side which could impact on the ability of the economy to generate jobs. The problem of jobs skills mismatch is a structural weakness of the labor market which can be addressed through coordination and joint action between the users and suppliers of manpower—the industries and the school system. Where the defect is the lack of labor market information, the answer obviously lies in a technology which enables relevant labor market information to reach the jobseekers and employers in a timely manner to ensure quick matching. Where the economy has a large informal sector, the interventions may come in the form of business development and micro-finance services which would promote the growth of micro-enterprises for them to participate in the formal economy, and thus increase the tax base of an LGU. The availability of relevant and affordable training is also crucial in addressing supply side concerns, especially where the skills needed are in acute shortage. In local economies where poverty incidence is high, labor market interventions may be directed at providing direct financial assistance to NGOs and LGUs that have programs in lending to the poor. Institutional inefficiencies Or it could be a matter of institutional inefficiencies which prevent the creation of more jobs. Such is the case of government agencies not in synch with each other or where the education and technical-vocation sector are producing graduates whose skills and competencies aren’t needed by local industries, or the overseas labor market. Or it could be a matter of the uncontrolled and unregulated outflow of skills critical to local industries to overseas, lowering our local industries’ productivity and increasing their recruitment and training costs. Support to Enterprise Development Or, what I feel is the greatest factor why there is lack of economic dynamism in the rural countryside, is the lack of access to micro-finance for small and micro-businessmen. The Grow Micro Program of DOLE 11 has proven to be an effective strategy in mobilizing micro-finance through the local government units and peoples’ organizations to address joblessness and lack of business opportunities in the rural areas. Grow Micro tapped and reconfigured existing local government institutions in providing micro-business development services to the informal sector, including micro-credit. To protect these micro-businesses, a social protection package is built into the implementing design. Security Issues The perception of a lack of progress in addressing the communist and Muslim secessionist movements is an albatross weighing heavily on our backs, without which we could create millions of jobs in areas and lands now lying idle due to security threats. Wide expanses of minerals-rich areas and fertile lands are within conflict-ridden areas that couldn’t be exploited to create jobs and livelihoods. Consequently, many of the poorest municipalities of the country are within the Autonomous Regions of Muslim Mindanao, and those regions with intractable Communist-driven insurgencies. We must create the conditions and the environment where the warring parties would find and actually benefit from the incentives of peace rather than covet the booty of war. Instead of imposing silly deadlines for ending insurgencies, which to date have never been met, we must root out the problem and see what political solutions are feasible. Military strategies only serve to widen the conflict, bloat the military’s budget and encourage corruption. Corruption issues Corruption in government also loses billions of pesos which could otherwise build more classrooms, build more roads and hire more doctors and nurses. It stymies our efforts to present a picture of clean and effective governance to the rest of the word, somebody investors can do business with. An anti-corruption czar should be appointed, subject to confirmation by the Commission on Appointments, not part of the executive branch and answerable only to a Commission composed of representatives from Congress, the Supreme Court and civil society, and invested with vast powers of investigation and prosecution. A Balanced Scorecard system should be made compulsory for all government agencies and the strategic objective of eliminating corruption should be the number one measure. At the end of say one year, government executives shall be made to account for the attainment of the anti-corruption goal and in case of failure, penalties should be imposed. Climate Change and Renewable Energy Jobs The government needs to take the high plane and invest on renewable energy to create green jobs. Although conventional energy jobs might be affected in the short run, this is how the labor market operates. No dramatic gain in jobs creation occurs unless some jobs destruction happens The change must be gradual, though. But an economy like the Philippines, with one of the highest birth rates in the region, cannot afford to invest in the future. Sources of renewable energy must be intensively explored. Wind, solar power, biofuels, geothermal—these are existing technologies that we must scale up. Imagine the savings on foreign exchange were we to obtain say 30% of our energy from renewable sources. We can think of investing these in the construction of elementary schools and the improvement of the quality of our teachers, or the modernization of our tech-voc facilities and instruction, or the construction of hospitals for the countryside. Support to Emerging Industries The BPO-ICT industry is one of the most employment-intensive industries to come out of the service sector in many years. Credit should be given to Senator Mar Roxas for conceptualizing and pushing it, and President Arroyo for aggressively pitching for it in the many foreign trips she made. As a result, we have one of the largest BPO sectors in the world, perhaps second only to India. There are many ways to attract BPO locators, but one of the best ways to do it is to ensure the quality of manpower in a locality through educational reforms and supply-side interventions in the labor market. A major BPO player locating in a city could mean thousands of decent and remunerative jobs immediately available for the city’s jobseekers. Unless we have a comprehensive plan to address all these issues together, our efforts will be ineffective and will not achieve the results in terms of a quantum leap in the number of decent and productive jobs being created to be made available to our unemployed and new graduates. A Robust Agricultural Sector Although the services sector now has the majority of employment in the country, agriculture if combined with agro-processing and input manufacturing and trading will account for 40% of GDP and two-thirds of employment. In other words, this sector is still critical to our economy, not only as source of raw material and contributor to economic output, but as source of manpower. (Cielito and Briones, 2005) In 2005, Habito and Briones in their paper, Philippine Agriculture over the Years: Performance, Policies and Pitfalls, wrote that “…the poor performance of the Philippine agricultural sector in recent decades traces not so much to weaknesses in the production sector itself, but to failures and shortcomings in the policy and institutional environment within which the sector operates. In other words, the action that is needed to address these failures falls squarely on the government’s shoulders, national and local, and in partnership with civil society. These are perspectives borne out of research and analysis which both the LCE and our new national leaders should be considering. We need not turn the sector upside down to find out what ails it because this has been studied by many scholars many times and all we need to do is to implement their recommendations. Our agriculture sector is not faring well compared to our Asian neighbors, and the prescriptions on what to do are already prepared. A Productivity-Oriented Wage Policy Wage setting is now in the hands of regional wage boards and routinely, they review the minimum wage rates every year. Every year, too, militant labor groups demand an across the board legislated increase of P125, with moderate unions somewhere in between. None of the social partners are satisfied after the wage boards decide because the demands are just way too high as to be inflationary. There must be a better way to set wages. On productivity? Why not? In the regional public consultations done in Davao recently, no less than the PMAP Chapter President, Joy Ciriaco, suggested that we peg wage rates on productivity increases. We need to explore this suggestion, which is not really new, but coming from an employers’ group, this is a welcome opportunity. The Productivity Incentives Act aims to reward increases with incentives and bonuses, subject to certain conditions. But the idea of setting the minimum wage rates on productivity would be quite revolutionary. How does one measure the productivity of an entry-level employee or worker? I suppose the devil is in the detail. Not all graduates are created equal But not all graduates from our private and public high schools have the means nor the intellectual capacity for a college education. In the National College Assessment Examination which the DepEd administered to graduating high school students, majority of the examinees had aptitude for technical-vocational education and many had entrepreneurial potential. We should henceforth make this examination as the basis for accepting students to college, to tech-voc education or to provide them a short but intensive course on entrepreneurship, after which they will participate in a business incubation experiment where they will be provided all the means, including start-up capital, to pursue their business ideas. For those who are presently unemployed but have entrepreneurial acumen, a non-collateral Entrepreneurial Seed Fund is to be created, in the amount of P5 billion pesos to lick the problem of unemployment in the rural areas. That’s not even half the budget of TESDA. The DOLE has a wide and long experience at micro-business development services for the informal sector and it can be the central administrator of the fund, with DSWD, DTI, DOST and LGUs as its conduits. Lack of effective coordination among government agencies and the schools system makes for labor market efficiencies. Fortunately, this is already being addressed by the DOLE through JobsFit, an effort to effectively connect industry and the suppliers of manpower by identifying the skills and competencies needed by industry in the short to long-term and the academe and techvoc sector committing to take steps in how and when and in what quantities these manpower should be produced. The JobsFit project should be supported by the next administration and invested with the character of a national priority agenda. How many jobs are lost due to the lack of qualified jobseekers? If the take up rate of the business processing industry now is 7% or less, obviously so many jobs are being lost to other countries, such as China or India. The other negative aspect of the jobs skills mismatch problem is the loss of skills for the learning of which families had invested a fortune. Nurses who couldn’t find nursing jobs for a long time, now work in call centers and department stores. Even doctors are now enrolled in nursing. For starters, entrepreneurial potential should be measured for graduating high school students and business development counseling made available so that the option of skipping college and starting a business enterprise is available to those interested and have the potential. We save billions of pesos on education for students whose hearts are not into it and should be encouraged to go into the entrepreneurial path. The marginalized has a right to employment, too, and we should not exclude them. The TechReady experience of DOLE Davao Region has taught us that it is possible for out of school youths, and even persons with disabilities and women, to earn a decent income without leaving their homes. All that is needed really is for them to have a personal computer, connectivity and a little training on outsourcing possibilities in the internet. The TechReady model which began in Davao has enabled its beneficiaries to earn from a low of P10,000 a month to a high of P60,000. Recently, TechReady won the grand prize, youth category, in the DOLE Kabuhayan Awards, with no less than President Arroyo giving the award. Considering that unemployment and underemployment are highest in rural areas where the predominant source of living is agriculture, a robust and aggressive agricultural development program should be the first order of the day for the new President. Let’s disabuse ourselves of this notion of self-sufficiency in rice because it can never happen. Because rice is a staple, and therefore politically sensitive, the government obviously couldn’t increase the purchase price of palay to a level where the farmer with say a hectare of land planted to rice would be able to earn a decent living for himself and his family. The production cost of rice farming in the Philippines is such that we are unable to compete with Thailand or Vietnam. In the latter countries, farmers enjoy free irrigation from their big river systems and low fertilizer costs. We must slowly wake up to the fact that there are areas where it simply uneconomical to plant rice, such as unirrigated and rainfed areas, and therefore the wise course for the farmer is to shift to a crop that is of high value and which is easy and cheap to produce, such as rubber. Will it lead to us importing more and more rice? Yes, it will, but it will also liberate our farmers from the bondage of rice, and enable them to earn so much more from cultivating other high-value commercial crops. Food security is not self-sufficiency in rice: it is for the farmer having enough income from crops that would sustain him and his family. The reason why the youth no longer see farming as an attractive means of livelihood because they see no money in it. But not if the 2 hectares, the average landholding size, were planted to a crop which earns a decent living for himself and his family. Why are we forcing our farmers to plant rice even in unirrigated areas, when it is not economical to do so, when doing so forces the farmer to go deeper and deeper into debt? Better to give him options as to what crops to plant, and provide him with all technical information and extension support for each recommended crop. Asset reform, or agrarian reform, is an issue which every President has had to grapple with, with varying degrees of success. We should stop being sentimental about this and consider the evidence. Have we increased farm productivity as a result of agrarian reform? Have we improved the socio-economic conditions of farmers after the implementation of agrarian reform? If the answer to both is yes, then we should pursue it. Proceeding from the principle that all developments are local, these assumptions need to be institutionalized at the local level. Labor and employment issues need to be integrated to the local development plans. Local planners and local chief executives should possess the skill in local employment planning. We humbly recommend the following local employment planning kit containing the elements of a local employment plan. Project characteristics: 1. It should be based and consistent with the Local Development Plan but not inconsistent with the National Development Plan. 2. To ensure continuity, the plan should be inclusive; all the stakeholders should be consulted and must participate in the planning process. 3. Applies the Focused Targeting and Identification approach. 4. It must be benchmarked on a regularly updated skills registry. 5. It must be resource based, relying mostly on local resources and not saddle future generations with the accumulation of debt. Elements of the Project: 1. Territorial Diagnosis / Situational Analysis - The first step in planning and implementing local development strategies. Its purpose is to acquire knowledge about the local economy and the community, and its resources, strengths and weaknesses in order to help local planners and stakeholders to identify a priority objective for action. After the industry focus is identified, tourism for example, all the efforts and resources of the LGU must be towards the development of tourism. 2. Skills Registry (SRS) - Rather than assume that macro-economic growth will trickle down the community, identifying the unemployed and their needs through the SRS makes the socio-economic impact of employment strategies and initiatives of the LGU more measurable and verifiable. Improvement and enhancement of these strategies is therefore easier. 3. Inventory of Resources - Rather than need-based, a resource based plan is easier to implement because only the resources in the locality will be used, thus allowing maximization of benefits and minimization of costs. Since it is also culture-based, the possibility of resistance is less. 4. Stakeholders Analysis – The purpose is to determine the role and contribution of each stakeholder so that in the planning and implementation of local development strategies, coordination and collaboration will result into synergies, scale, scope and depth. 5. Entrepreneurial Development Program - Maximize the entrepreneurial acumen of the LGU’s constituents and the actual contribution of the business sectors in the economy. It includes the accounting of the projected number of jobs created or beneficiaries. Where not yet available, access to micro-financing for entrepreneurial business ideas should be made available through a grant or by the LGU setting aside funds as seed money. The Grow Micro/Microbiz Incubation Center model may be used for this purpose. 6. Investment Promotion Plan - Put together in partnership with DTI, this plan will capture the set of local policies to attract local and foreign investments. 7. Employment Facilitation Strategies - This will enumerate the various employment facilitation strategies, plans and activities to ensure a quick and least expensive way of making the employers and job seekers meet for job matching purposes, such as jobs fairs, career fairs and special recruitment activities. 8. Coordinative Mechanism between Industry and Academe - To facilitate efficient job matching within the labor market and to efficiently produce qualified manpower and to ensure that academic and technical/vocational courses offered are suited to the local industry’s manpower needs, a coordinating body between the suppliers and users of human resources should be set up and convened regularly. 9. Infrastructure Development Plan – These are promotional and advocacy activities and events to ensure that local infrastructure projects maximize employment opportunities for local job seekers. Labor intensive infrastructure creates more jobs for local residents allowing the economy to grow by increasing the purchasing capability of the labor sector. 10. Cooperative Development Plan - Cooperatives are income and employment generators. By providing them the necessary support, they will be able to provide income to their members, as well as provide a possible source of employment. Cooperatives spur economic activities in the rural countryside through resource pooling of people who would otherwise be incapable of capitalizing business activities on their own. 11. Social Services Spending Plan - To provide a basic level of social protection to the LGUs constituents, the LGU should commit a certain level of social services spending which allows for access to basic health and education services. This ensures that the incomes earned by the LGUs constituents are spent on the family’s basic needs other than health and education. To ensure that the technology for local employment planning is applied at the local government level, a 4-week non-degree course on employment planning shall be made available by the Department of Labor and Employment in collaboration with a leading academic institution in each region. The LCE, the chief of planning services, the PESO Manager, the head of the enterprise development office and the Chair of the Committee on Labor and Employment of the Sanggunian shall be invited. To ensure that the local government units are connecting their development vision and strategic goals with their activities and initiatives on employment, a Balanced Scorecard system shall be advocated and a quick orientation and workshop shall be done for the same group of people. Perhaps, an additional weekend shall be devoted solely to the orientation and workshop. In summary, unemployment may be daunting at the national level, but if it were localized and the processes and dynamics to address it integrated into the local development agenda, the issue becomes much more manageable. If all the LGUs were to address their unemployment and poverty issues in this manner, the consolidated effect would obviously be substantial. The resources are available, if only the LCE would have the courage to summon the political will to push for his employment-centered development agenda.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 02:05:46 +0000
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