Upgrading the country’s infrastructure is one of the top concerns of the Duterte administration. To do so, it needs to lead the effort in upgrading the construction industry.
Official unemployment numbers say there should be plenty of workers looking for jobs, at least 2.36 million as of June. However, even if jobs under President Duterte’s “Build, Build, Build” (BBB) agenda are available, not a lot of job seekers seem qualified to build all the roads, bridges, airports and railways the government needs for this ambitious infrastructure program.
The Department of Labor and Employment’s Bureau of Local Employment estimates demand at over 1 million construction workers for the BBB program alone, as our recent BusinessMirror story (“Challenge Accepted” by Lorenz Marasigan) reported. But in 2017—when jobs in the construction sector reached 3.59 million, or about 158,000 more than the 3.31 million construction workers in 2016—there was already a shortage of 120,000 workers.
The government launched in May an online jobs portal for the BBB program, listing 11,000 vacancies in ongoing projects. The portal is expected to post “hundreds of thousands” of employment opportunities through 2022.
Filling these vacancies is not going to be easy.
Many of our skilled construction workers, contractors, architects and engineers have left for overseas jobs, where they get paid at least four times as much. To entice them to come home, the government must make the industry provide competitive compensation and benefits, or perhaps provide tax incentives and other perks to even things out.
Compounding the problem, whole generations of younger workers are no longer even considering construction as a viable career option. Personal preferences, their parents’ wishes, even our own education system, have steered our high-school graduates to college courses and white-collar careers.
The traditional formula of “college = white-collar job = success” is precisely what the K to 12 (kindergarten plus six years grade school, four years of junior high school and two years of senior high school) curriculum change was supposed to tweak, but how many senior high-school students are taking the vocational-technical strands of the curriculum? And do schools even offer these strands?
Let’s face it: “Success” for most Filipino kids is still very much equated with a glamorized white-collar job, working for a firm in Makati or some other business district. There is still the stigma of a vocational education—the belief that it leads to lower wages, contractual and menial jobs and the label of being a noncollege degree holder.
If our goal is to bring back the dignity of blue-collar jobs by producing a highly skilled work force demanded by industries like the construction sector, the government would also need the support of employers and businesses, the various chambers of commerce, and other stakeholders to work with the education sector.
We need to bring back the emphasis on the trades in high school and college and focus on apprenticeship programs where our young people can learn a trade. In Germany, for instance, students aged 16 to 19 years old, outside of their school work, are trained in companies for three to five days a week for two to three years, where they also earn a small stipend. The process ends with a certification examination.
More than 350 professions are officially recognized in Germany as training occupations with more than 60 percent of high-school graduates regularly participating in the program. This is a big factor why Germany’s youth unemployment remains low.
To bridge the labor gap in construction, the industry also needs to focus on recruiting more women, whether as construction managers or onsite workers. This is the 21st century, where overseas employers even prefer Filipina welders and heavy equipment operators. New building technology has made the requirement for brute physical work, commonly associated with men (often mistakenly), inapplicable to construction. Besides, construction work involves more than just physical skills, but technical and even scientific skills, as well.
The construction industry has an opportunity for higher growth and unqualified success for smart and hardworking Filipinos who desire to make a lifelong career in it, if both the government and the private sector can work together to professionalize the industry.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano