Youth unemployment hit roughly 13.5% in June. The jobs thinning are the middle ones.
A new International Labour Organization report says clerical, sales and service work across Southeast Asia shrank 4.1% in two years. Those are the roles most exposed to AI.
The International Labour Organization released its youth jobs report on Tuesday, and the Philippine numbers behind it are not good. Philippine Statistics Authority figures for June show the youth employment rate fell to 86.5%, down from 90.6% a year earlier. That works out to a youth unemployment rate of roughly 13.5%. Of the 6.28 million young Filipinos who did have work in June, about 743,000 were underemployed, meaning they wanted more hours or better pay than the job gave them.
What a middle-skilled job is
Middle-skilled work sits between the two ends everyone pictures. Not the boss, not the heavy manual labor. It is the clerk, the sales staff, the person at the service desk, the one who handles the paperwork and the calls. Across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, those jobs fell 4.1% between 2023 and 2025. The ILO calls it a hollowing out, and it names those exact roles as the ones most exposed to AI doing the work task by task.
More younger people are entering the labor market, but there are not enough jobs and many of the jobs are of low quality, as shown in underemployment statistics.
Why it matters
That middle rung is where most Filipinos start. Benjamin Velasco of the University of the Philippines Diliman School of Labor and Industrial Relations, who gave the quote above, points out that outsourcing alone employs more than a million Filipinos, many of them young. The ILO also found that in this region a young person is between 5 and 7 times more likely to be jobless than an older one, one of the widest gaps in the world. Velasco says a lot of the young workers who do find something are landing in gig work, delivery riding, virtual assistance, remote freelancing, which pays but carries no real job protection.
The catch to watch
The regional forecast is milder than the headline suggests. The ILO expects youth unemployment across Southeast Asia and the Pacific to ease slightly to 9.1% in 2026 and 9% in 2027, down from 9.5% in 2025. The 13.5% figure is one month of Philippine data, not a settled trend, and one month can swing. What is harder to argue with is the shape of it. Globally, youth unemployment rose to 12.4% in 2025, about 67 million young people, and the share of jobs disappearing is concentrated in the kind of work a fresh graduate here would normally apply for first.