Government has 199,000 job vacancies

MANILA, Philippines — Looking for a job? Try asking government agencies or checking their websites.

The bureaucracy, the country’s biggest employer, has almost 199,000 job vacancies this year. However, filling those jobs would hardly reduce unemployment.

The Philippine Statistics Authority has recently reported that as of last January, there were 2.3 million employable Filipinos without jobs.

According to the 303-page staffing summary submitted to the House of Representatives by the Department of Budget and Management, the government has a total of 1,863,361 permanent positions this year, from the President down to the lowest-paid janitor or clerk.

Of that number, 1,664,586 are occupied, while 198,775 are vacant.

Of the more than 1.8 million jobs in the bureaucracy, more than half are in the Department of Education (DepEd), which has 999,159 positions, of which 907,133 are filled. That means that 92,026, mostly teaching posts, are vacant.

Teacher recruits in the public school system hold Salary Grade (SG) 11 and get a basic monthly pay of P20,754. SG 11 is also the pay level of government nurses.

There are reports that new education and nursing graduates are joining the Philippine National Police (PNP) due to higher compensation. Early last year, President Duterte doubled the salaries of soldiers and policemen to P30,000.

The President has repeatedly promised to also increase remuneration for teachers and nurses.

After DepEd, the PNP has the second highest number of vacancies among state agencies. The national police organization has 214,410 in authorized jobs for uniformed personnel, of which 187,725 are occupied and 26,685 are unoccupied.

Add to the number of vacancies are 10,000 new Police Officer 1 positions Duterte has authorized to be created, and for which he included funds in the proposed P4.1-trillion national budget for next year.

In his budget message to Congress, the President said the country would have attained the ideal ratio of one cop for every 500 Filipinos when all the needed policemen are recruited.

At 13,058, the Department of Health is in third place in terms of job vacancies. It has 72,479 authorized positions, of which 59,421 are filled.

In fourth place is the judiciary, which has 12,977 unfilled jobs. In fifth is the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (now Bangsamoro regional government), which has 9,088 vacancies.

The lowest monthly salary in government (SG 1) is P11,068, while the highest (SG 33), that of President Duterte, is P399,739.