TACLOBAN CITY- Sheila Camposano,34 and a mother of two children, worked as a waitress in one of the restaurants here in the city.
But after only working for less than five months, she lost her job last March, the time the quarantine period started due to the pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
“The restaurant stopped its operation which resulted for us workers to lose our jobs. I am just an ordinary food server earning less than P200 a day. But now, I have no job and I have been looking around with no positive result at all,” she said.
She said that she even went to house-to-house just to find work as a house help.
Camposano is just one of the more than 250,000 people in the region who have lost their employment related to the COVID-19 pandemic, report the regional office of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
According to the PSA, as of April of this year, about 251,000 people in Eastern Visayas were rendered unemployment amid the COVID-19 pandemic which saw several business establishments either totally closing or limiting their operations which resulted to job losses.
The PSA said that the number of people who lost their work represents a whopping 14.3 unemployment rate of the region which higher by 10.3 percent compare to the same period of April,2019 or 4.0 percent.
This makes Eastern Visayas as the fifth region in the country to have posted a high unemployment rate during this time of pandemic.
Meantime, the underemployed or those employed persons who express the desire to have additional hours of work in their present job or to have additional job was estimated at 328,000 April 2020.
This figure translates to an underemployment rate of 21.8 percent, higher than the 18.6 percent recorded in the same period last year.
The region has about 1.7 million in the employment force in April of this year, PSA said.
(JOEY A. GABIETA)
