Employment in the country across establishments registered a sluggish gain in the third quarter of 2018

The latest result of the Labor Turnover Survey placed the labor turnover rate at 0.9 percent, lower by 0.8 percentage point from the previous quarter’s 1.7 percent. This implied an additional 9 workers per 1,000 employed persons to the establishments’ workforce.

Accession rate stood at 9.5 percent which was slightly higher than the 8.6 percent separation rate posted for the period. These estimates denoted that for every 1,000 employed, 95 workers were hired either for business expansion or replacement of separated workers while 86 workers were either laid-off or quit their jobs during the reference period.

Services sector sustained gain in employment

Among major sectors, only services contributed a lift to the employment for the period, though with minimal increase at 1.3 percent. Accession and separation rates in this sector were recorded at 8.9 and 7.5 percent, respectively. Across industries under this sector, significant employment growths were posted in private education at 3.3 percent. This was followed by wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles, motorcycles (2.5%); financial and insurance activities (1.6%); and arts, entertainment and recreation (1.4%).

Agriculture, forestry and fishing sector continued to post a negative labor turnover rate of 0.4 percent, as separation rate was higher than the accession rate.

Employment growth in industry sector was registered at -0.1 percent. Three out of five sub-sectors reported higher separations than accessions of workers. Under this group, employment loss was mostly observed in construction industry at 0.8 percent. This offsets the 0.6 percent gain in employment in mining and quarrying.

FOR THE NATIONAL STATISTICIAN:

JOSIE B. PEREZ
Assistant Secretary
(Deputy National Statistician)
Officer-In-Charge

See more at the Labor Turnover Survey (LTS) Landing page.

TECHNICAL NOTES

The Labor Turnover Survey (LTS) is conducted quarterly to come up with timely information on labor market trends in the formal sector of the economy, the items of inquiry have been limited to employment, labor turnover and existing job vacancies. Labor turnover statistics, as a measure of labor demand, provides policy and decision makers complementary data on labor supply which helps them in examining and analyzing the labor market situation of the nation’s economy.

To get a more complete picture of the labor market situation in the whole country, the LTS is conducted nationwide covering establishments with 20 or more workers starting 1st Quarter 2018. The unit of enumeration for the 2018 LTS is the establishment. An establishment is defined as an economic unit under a single ownership or control which engages in one or predominantly one kind of economic activity at a single fixed location. The establishment sampling frame for the survey was extracted from the preliminary 2017 List of Establishments (LE) as of January 2018. A total of 5,469 sample establishments for the 2018 LTS nationwide were selected. Some of the sample establishments reported consolidated data; however, estimates of these data were not weighted. Response rate for all industries was 89.59% for the 3rd Quarter 2018.

DEFINITION OF TERMS AND CONCEPTS

1. Labor Turnover – refers to the changes in the employment of an establishment resulting from accessions and separations.

2. Accessions (New Hires) - refer to permanent or temporary additions to employment in the establishment due to 1) expansion of business activity and 2) replacement of separated workers and employment resulting from changes in methods/technology of production or service.

3. Separations - refer to terminations of employment due to the following:  

a) quits or terminations initiated by employees; and
b) layoffs or terminations initiated by employers due to economic reasons (e.g., lack of market, financial losses, redundancy, end of contract) and non-economic reasons (e.g., gross negligence, AWOL)