SENATOR Francis Escudero yesterday urged the government to develop “firm-specific skills” to improve employability and arrest  increasing unemployment.

He made the appeal as more than 700,000 graduates are expected to enter the labor market on top of some 564,000 other college graduates who are still looking for jobs.

“These figures from Commission on Higher Education and the Department of Labor confirm the notion that more and more educated Filipinos find it difficult to find local employment. Of course, the conventional recourse is to look for jobs abroad even if the opportunities there are thinning,” Escudero said.

He raised the need to immediately address unemployment since overseas Filipinos may have begun to lose their jobs in the face of the instability in the Middle East and the continuing economic problems confronting the United States and Europe.

“Add to these is the number of discouraged workers or those who stopped looking for work believing that there is no more available vacancy as well as unpaid family workers, and the number becomes bigger. Government must implement a spending program to stimulate employment in response to this,” Escudero said.

The senator reiterated his proposal for the government to roll out projects, including skills development, that can be funded by the national budget, and impose job-benchmarking for every peso spent for taxes.