Job fairs hint market recovery

CEBU, Philippines - Some companies in Cebu are slowly seeing signs of recovery as new orders are starting to come in and proof of that is the number of job fairs held last week in various places in the city.

In an interview with DOLE Central Visayas regional director Elias Cayanong, he said although it may not reflect the economic state of the region, some companies especially from the manufacturing sector are already receiving orders and are now in a “hiring mode”

Cayanong said some of these companies have reported retrenchment cases due to slow orders during the previous months.

“Some companies may still be freezing hiring because they are in a wait and see phase but some companies are starting to hire back again because they are positioning themselves and look forward to the upswing in the economy so they are mobilizing already,” said Cayanong.

Manufacturing companies that are currently hiring include electronic companies that have clinched new deals from their clients such as Mitsumi, which is hiring 1,500 production workers, Kyocera, Pentax, and Platex, among others, said Cayanong.

He said that from the 164 locators in the Mactan Export Processing Zones (MEPZ), about 10 companies are now in a hiring and production mode and they are seeing this number to increase further.

“These companies have consolidated their operations and they are in production mode again so they are hiring back workers and this has so far tapered down retrenchments. Although this does not mean total recovery for Central Visayas, this has somehow given us lesser headache,” said Cayanong.

He said that because of this, DOLE is looking at a lesser number of accounted retrenchments cases for the month of April.

Last February, DOLE VII reported the highest case of retrenchments with about 2, 238 and this has reduced to around 759 in March.

Meanwhile, in a recently held JOBapalooza in line with the celebration of the Labor Day, DOLE offered around 10,500 local and overseas jobs excluding those from the BPO and contact center industry simultaneously in three locations including the Cebu City Sports Complex, Provincial Capitol and the SM City Cebu.

Cayanong said that the overwhelming number of job vacancies indicate that some companies are recovering.

He also stressed that despite the good news, some companies especially exporters whose clients are car manufacturers are still facing the wall because they still have plenty of inventories.

In a separate interview, Pentax Cebu Philippines Corp. assistant general manager Renato T. Bontol said that indeed orders are starting to come back and they have started to heighten their productions in Mactan as of this moment.

He said that their Cebu operations have benefited from the voluntary reduction of workers in their Japan plant because the workload has been transferred in Cebu.

Bontol who is also the vice president of the Human Resources Association in MEPZ said that this has been the cost reduction effort of their mother company owing to cheaper labor here in the country compared to that of Japan.