Almost Everyone Works. A Third Have No Wage.

Philippine unemployment is 2.24 out of every 100 workers. That is very low. Almost everybody who wants work has some.

And poverty is 15.5 out of every 100 people.

Those two numbers sit badly together. If nearly everyone is working, why is one in six poor?

The Number Nobody Quotes

There is a second jobs number. It counts people who work for themselves, or work unpaid in a family business. No wage. No contract. No sick day.

It is called vulnerable employment. Ours is 33.6 out of every 100 workers.

A third of everyone working. The tricycle driver. The sari-sari store. The kid helping at the family stall.

None of them are unemployed. So the low unemployment number is true. It is just answering a different question than the one people think it answers.

You can have almost everybody working and still be poor, if the work does not pay.

Poverty Is Falling

This part is good news and I do not want to bury it.

15.5 out of 100 people live under the national poverty line, down from 23.5.

On the World Bank's line of about 3.65 dollars a day, it is 16.9 out of 100. On their deeper line of 2.15 dollars, 5.3.

Fewer poor people, by every way of counting. That is real.

But The Sharing Did Not Change

Here is the part that has barely moved in my lifetime.

There is a score for how unevenly income is split. Ours is 39.3. In 1985 it was 41.0.

That is a change of 1.7 in thirty-eight years.

Put it another way. The poorest 20 out of every 100 Filipinos share 6.9 of the country's income between them.

The richest 10 share 31.6.

Half as many people. Four and a half times the money.

So growth did reach poor people — poverty really is down. It just reached everyone else at least as much, so the shape stayed the same.

A Thing About These Numbers

These do not come out every year.

They come from big household surveys that happen every few years. I have 14 survey points spread over 38 years.

So I drew them as dots on a real timeline, not as a smooth line. A smooth line would be me making up the years in between, and those years were never measured.

What I Could Not Get

The old version of this page had farm wages by region, farm household income, and rural income spread.

Those come from the statistics agency, and its website turns away programs. So I have none of it.

Worse, the old page put a wage from 2015 next to a farm income from 2002 and an employment figure from 2016, all in a row, as if they described the same moment. They were up to fourteen years apart.

Everything here is national and everything is dated. Less detail. But you can check all of it.