The Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) on Tuesday sees the positive result of the Labor Force Survey (LFS) conducted in July as a challenge for the agency to sustain and improve the situation of the country’s employment situation.

In a statement, DoLE Secretary Silvestre Bello III said that he is optimistic that the country’s current employment situation will improve for as long as the agency can sustain its programs stemming from the improvements in the employment and underemployment rates in the country.

“Amid the stable employment situation in the country, we need to sustain our efforts to strengthen decent work gains and address the remaining challenges,” said Bello. “Our aim at the Department is to secure employment, make employment more meaningful, more productive, and more beneficial to the workers, which in turn induce greater productivity to our employers and business.”

To recall, the survey — conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) — showed a 94.6 percent employment rate, which translates to almost 43 million employed Filipinos in the month of July this year.

Compared to the 41 million employed persons during the same period last year, the employment rate has shown a significant growth of 5.7 percent and of those employed, 5.9 million or 13.9 percent are underemployed, or those who expressed the desire to have additional hours of work in their present job, to have additional job, or to have a new job with longer working hours.

The figure is a reduction of over a million underemployed workers compared to the 7 million or 17.2 percent underemployed Filipinos in July 2018.