Ecozone job vacancies top 40,000

The Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) has launched an online job expo offering more than 40,000 openings across the country and included work-from-home call center positions.

The move is aimed at helping stem the worsening unemployment, which the pandemic brought to its highest in more than a decade.

The job openings, according to ecozone agency, were based on job vacancies reported by Peza-registered companies. The expo was launched on Wednesday.

The investment projects approved earlier this month are also expected to generate 28,811 jobs once these become operational, Peza said.

Interested applicants can check the vacancies on an online portal on Peza’s official website. They can filter their options, choose by location or industry or just pick jobs that allow work-from-home arrangements.

“These job vacancies are for Filipinos of any working age and there will be no educational attainment discrimination in the hiring of workers in the ecozones,” said Peza Director General Charito Plaza.

This is part of the agency’s Dollar program, which stands for Development Outreach for Labor, Livelihood and Advancement of Resources. Peza said there would also be a program on online skills training.

The program was launched in the middle of a health crisis, worsened by another crisis brought about by some of the administration’s misplaced priorities during the pandemic.

Latest available data showed that there were 7.3 million unemployed Filipinos during the second month of the lockdown in April when 75 percent of the country’s economic activities stopped. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the unemployment rate reached 17.7 percent that month, the highest in 15 years.

The unemployment was also exacerbated by the job losses of tens of thousands of Filipinos working abroad after the health crisis triggered a global economic slump, forcing many companies to lay off workers.

“We are inviting the repatriated overseas Filipino workers as well as the locally laid-off workers rendered jobless by the pandemic to participate in the Dollar Job Expo and Online Skills Training programs as it is Peza’s initiatives to help them during these trying times,” Plaza said.