MANILA, 26 July 2007 — The phrase “overworked but underpaid” may not yet be a thing of the past but here comes a new word that may add up to the Filipino workers’ vocabulary: Overemployment.
Overemployment is the opposite of underemployment. It is a state where workers work more than eight hours a day hoping to add more to their take-home pay.
The Department of Labor and Employment recognizes this new phenomenon as close to one-fourth of employed workers or almost five of every 20 employed Filipinos in the country were overemployed.
Labor Secretary Arturo Brion cited a Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics report saying that overemployed workers worked excessively per week in their primary job exceeding the 48 hour usual work time — for additional earnings.
Some overemployed workers, however, extended some extra hours at work to comply with their employers’ request or requirement.
Brion said overemployment, along with underemployment, reflects the need to analyze the country’s employment problems at present to find solutions to the country’s perennial labor problems. He said that working for long hours is detrimental to health and well-being of workers that may affect their productivity levels, work quality and family relationships.
International Labor Organization Convention No. 1, 1919, says that “working hours of persons employed in any public or private industrial undertaking or in any of its branches other than that where only family members are employed, shall not exceed eight in the day and 48 in the week.”
This has been reiterated in the 1974 Philippine Labor Code, which states that the normal hours of any employee shall not exceed eight hours a day and that an individual is entitled to a rest period of not less than 24 consecutive hours after every six consecutive normal work days.
Overemployed Filipino workers reached 7.6 million in 2006. More than half or 4.1 million overemployed are men. Women count less than half but they are more overworked because they still do household chores after the eight-hour work.
Around 65 percent or four million in 2001 and five million in 2006 of those who worked more than 48 hours were married. One-third of the overemployed married workers belonged to age group 35-44 years old.
