I.

Introduction

Beggars along the sidewalk, street kids collecting leftover foods from the garbage cans,

and homeless people sleeping on the road, these sights are common all over the world; poverty is

plaguing the whole world. This doesn’t exist only in third world countries; this “plague” is

affecting even the first world countries. This growing crisis is caused by people not being able to

live a good life because they don’t have the financial capability to which is mainly due to

unemployment. Unemployment is the state where a graduate or an individual who is not studying

has no job. Unemployment occurs when there is a shortage in demand for job, or there is an

excess in supply of labor. Either way the unemployment rate would definitely increase.

Unemployment means that one is in a state wherein he is involuntarily not employed. This is

often the case of most of the unemployed people. Unemployment can be defined in lots of ways.

It is very hard to define because it is subjective and is defined differently by different

individuals. We also consider a lot of factors in deciding whether it is unemployment or not.

Those that are not looking for a job but is not working are not considered unemployed neither are

they employed. So given that fact how can we really say that one is unemployed? Those that are

on seasonal jobs cannot be considered as unemployed as well because they are not really

unemployed, they are just “seasonally employed”. That’s what makes unemployment hard to

define, because it is really subjective.

As soon as a person reaches adulthood, they will now be considered as part of the labor

force and if they are involuntarily unemployed then they will add up to the unemployment rate of

the country which is the aggregate of the unemployed population. Every country in the world

experiences unemployment problem, and this worsened during the last two years when the global
financial crisis began. The Philippines is not an exception, currently the Philippines is

experiencing a big unemployment problem. This may be due to a lot of possible causes,

Inefficient governance can be one of the main reasons because why a lot of our labor force are

idle. Corruption is another main issue regarding unemployment, because if money that the

government collects are not properly allocated to improvement of cities in order to encourage

foreign investors that would eventually increase demand for labor, and not enough funds are

allocated on building school buildings which would improve the literacy rate, and eventually

improve demand for the laborers in our country.

One of the immediate effect of unemployment is poverty, and when poverty increases

there is a big possibility that crime rate would also increase. This would result to more

complicated problems in our society and would have a chain reaction.

Here are some ways that are used individually or combined: improving skills of local

laborers to attract foreign investors, providing more jobs through development of small

businesses, and so on. The choices are infinite, but in this particular research paper, we will focus

on removing minimum wage law by abolishing the minimum wage law that contributes to

unemployment in the society. It seems that it protects the workers from employers that take

advantage, but in the end it really does not help laborers in terms of making more jobs readily

available.