Four people have died and 17 are missing, most of them construction workers, after a nine-storey hotel under construction in the Philippines collapsed over the weekend.

Rescuers pulled three workers from the immense pile of rubble in Angeles City, Pampanga, on Monday. One was already dead and the other succumbed to his injuries shortly after being extricated.

Emergency personnel struggled to revive the unresponsive worker in an ambulance near the pile of concrete slabs, iron bars and aluminium scaffoldings that was all that remained of the building. They eventually gave up and drove away.

Hundreds of rescuers led by firefighters and police scrambled for hours to extricate the workers who were alive at the time but trapped under concrete slabs and iron bars.

Rescuers tried to give water and medicine intravenously to one of the trapped workers in a desperate effort to keep him alive in the scorching summer heat, regional police chief, Jess Mendez, said. But “he never made it despite all the efforts".

One of the three people pulled out from the rubble on Monday was unidentified and was not on the list of the 17 missing, who were mostly construction workers, according to Angeles city information chief Jay Pelayo.

The fourth dead victim was a Malaysian tourist trapped in a budget inn that was partly hit by the avalanche of debris from the collapsed building. Another guest at the inn was injured but managed to dash out, officials said.

A day after the unfinished building collapsed with a loud crashing sound after a fierce thunderstorm, Angeles City mayor Carmelo Lazatin said rescue efforts would still not be shifted to a body retrieval operation.

"My best hope is that we can rescue more people alive," the mayor said. “We do not want to give the families of the trapped workers any bad news."

Anxiety and fear among relatives of the trapped workers waiting in sheds near the rubble were deepening by the hour.

“I'm losing hope because of what I see," said Lea Mendoza Casilao, “slow rescue work.”

Ms Casilao, 47, a sardine factory worker, said that her boyfriend, a mason, was among the people still trapped in the rubble. She had brought a week's supply of rice and sardines for him at the construction site, but they would never meet as planned over the weekend after the building where he was sleeping crumbled before dawn on Sunday.

Mr Lazatin said that rescuers were moving carefully because huge slabs of concrete were hanging precariously from a tangle of aluminium scaffoldings and could crash down.

At least 26 workers had either been rescued or managed to run out of the collapsing building, where they slept on pieces of plywood on the ground floor.

Of the 17 workers still missing, one had been located but was yet to be extricated, authorities said.

National police chief Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr said his force would support an "ongoing investigation to determine the cause of the incident and possible violations of safety and building regulations”.

Angeles City hosted one of the largest American air force bases outside the US, helping turn it and its outlying cities into entertainment and commercial hubs in the main northern region of Luzon.

Clark Air Base, about 80km north of Manila, closed in the early 1990s and the site became a bustling industrial and tourism enclave called the Clark Freeport Zone. It’s still surrounded by remnants of the red-light strips, bars, nightclubs, tattoo shops, and budget hotels that flourished when the base was active.