Wasted window

Wasted window | Daily Tribune

Numbers from an IBON study tell a clear story. Between July 2025 and July 2026, 1.3 million more young Filipinos entered the labor force. They came looking for work, but they could not find it because the market did not have it for them.

Youth unemployment climbed by 276,000, to 1.4 million and the jobless rate for this dominant section of the population hit 18.6 percent, three times the national figure, the worst of the Marcos presidency.

That gap between the youth rate and the total share of the unemployed is the shape of a generation being told, in the coldest language an economy speaks, that it is not needed.

Of the jobless youth, 96 percent, or 1.3 million young people, are not in employment, education, or training, or NEET.

Add nearly two million more who face the same condition but sit outside the labor force entirely, uncounted even in the unemployment rate, and the true number of young Filipinos adrift approaches three million.

They are locked out of the two doors of a job or a classroom — through which a young person builds a life — because of a policy failure.

Employment grew by 3.2 million in July, and most of that growth was for part-time work. Informal work grew by 2.4 million and now makes up 39 percent of those employed. This is not a labor market absorbing its youth.

The deeper accusation in the IBON study is not about the numbers but the strategy employed.

For decades, the governing formula has been foreign investment as the engine of jobs: liberalize, incentivize, wait for capital to arrive and hire.

IBON’s data showed the investments came, by whatever measure the government prefers to cite and the jobs it produced for the young are informal and insufficient, failing the young most severely.

IBON has a counter-prescription: a turn toward domestic agriculture and Filipino industry. But that will draw the usual objections that it will introduce a protectionist and backward-looking system, out of step with a globalized economy.

The working-age share of the population will not stay this large forever. The window narrows as the population ages, as it has in Japan, South Korea and China, before these nations grew rich.

Countries that used their window well became middle-income and then wealthy. Countries that missed it grew old before they grew rich. The three million idle young Filipinos in these numbers are not a footnote to that history. They are its leading edge.

The choice is still, barely, before the country’s leaders, but it will not stay there long.

A demographic dividend spent on part-time work and idle hands is nothing but a debt, and the young will be the ones left to pay it.