MANILA, Philippines — The world is more than three years removed from the last great economic meltdown but remains at the mercy of its lingering impacts. One of the most deleterious has been the massive loss of jobs, and many economies’ subsequent inability to generate these back.

The newly released “Global Employment Trends 2012” report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) confirms this. The crisis in global labor markets has persisted since late 2008, so much so that the global unemployment of 200 million today is 27 million more than at the beginning of the crisis. And to avoid further increase in unemployment, 400 million new jobs must be created over the next 10 years to absorb the 40 million annual expansion of the labor pool.

So in all, the ILO believes the world needs to generate at least 600 million productive jobs to stimulate growth and prevent social unrest. This is already a staggering number but does not even capture the magnitude of poverty arising from the lack of decent jobs. About 900 million workers worldwide, mostly in developing nations like ours, subsist on only US$2 a day. Unemployment among the youth has increased by 4 million since 2007 to 74.8 million. And, most worryingly, the number of people in “vulnerable employment” or informal work arrangements now total 1.52 billion.

Our country displayed remarkable resilience during the economic downturn, one of a handful of countries whose economic growth did not decelerate. The Southeast Asia and Pacific region averaged growth rates of 4.5 percent, 1.6 percent and 7.5 percent from 2008-2010. The Philippines managed to keep up, posting growth rates of 4.2 percent, 1.1 percent and 7.6 percent.

But growth has since faltered. Our own economic planning agency, NEDA, expects full year growth in 2011 to come up to only 3.6 percent to 4 percent, lower than its initial 5 percent forecast.

Furthermore, we have dented the unemployment rate only marginally — from 7.4 percent in 2010 down to 7.0 percent in 2011 — while the underemployment rate ballooned by an almost equal proportion from 18.8 percent to 19.3 percent.

Additionally, our unemployment rates are much higher than the region’s average of 4.8 percent in 2010 and preliminary estimate of 4.7 percent in 2011.

In the last quarter of 2011, the government bannered a R72-billion stimulus package to help shore up growth. In truth, however, this was no more than catch-up spending plan to make up for laggard public investments throughout the year, one of the major reasons for the slowdown in the first place.

Now is the time to come up and roll out a genuine stimulus program targeted at creating jobs, clearly our most pressing challenge. We have to realize, and admit, that millions of Filipinos lost jobs and slid back into poverty when we starved infrastructure spending — the foremost job creator — while choosing to focus almost exclusively on the CCT program.

Stimulating the real economy to create jobs requires a two-pronged approach. First, we ought to re-examine if our labor policies have kept up to the times. Last year, Congress passed a law amending the Labor Code in so far as repealing the prohibitions of night work for men and women — a response to the needs of half a million employees in the IT-BPO sector — and introducing safeguards for them. But we ought to further overhaul our Labor Code, passed in 1974, in light of technological advancements and globalization of the workplace.

Finally, the government will spur job creation if it is able to encourage private sector expansion. Infrastructure will, again, be decisive in this regard, and so will the ease of doing business and a predictable incentives regime. But more than helping big businesses, the government must come to the aid of micro, small and medium-scale enterprises (MSME’s) as they employ 70 percent of our workforce and account for 30 percent of our total output. What they need most is, first, access to credit especially in such a risk-averse environment; the opportunity to utilize, if not create, technological innovations; and expansion to new markets here, abroad and over the Internet.

The Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement are powerful reminders — warnings even — that further failure to reduce unemployment can incite widespread resentment and unrest that could rip through the very social fabric holding us together.

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