No raises can be expected on May Day

Philippine President Benigno Aquino III will be meeting labour leaders today, though the country’s workforce should not expect any immediate announcement of wage benefits, deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said.

“The president is going to sit down with them for dialogue and also help Secretary [Rosalinda] Baldoz appeal to the workers’ sector … to wait for the unveiling of the package. That’s non-wage benefits,” Valte said.

Valte added that the public should withhold commenting on the package until it is presented.

Before the presidential palace unveiled the package of non0wage benefits, Partido ng Manggagawa (Workers and Farmers’ Party) described the minimum pay as “starvation wages”.

“The minimum wage cannot buy a working-class family its daily bread. The Constitution mandates that a worker receive a living wage. Instead, the regional wage boards prescribed a libing [burial] wage,” the party’s secretary-general Judy Miranda said.

The group said its study showed that a family of six living in Manila required at least 1,217 pesos (Bt850) a day to survive. 

“This estimate shows that the gap between the 456-peso minimum wage in [Metro Manila] and the present cost of living is a yawning 761 pesos, or 167 per cent of the ordinary wage. Even if both parents work – which is the buy-one, take-one policy of the government – their combined income will not be enough to feed the entire family,” Miranda said.

The group’s cost-of-living estimate did not provide for savings and social security, which in the government’s basket of goods and services constitute 10 per cent of the cost of living.

Miranda said the study did not include leisure or recreational activities or medical expenses. 

“If we include such items, and we must in a more accurate survey, then the cost of living will significantly exceed 1,200 pesos per day,” she said.

 

Hopelessly outdated

 “The National Wages and Productivity Council’s cost of living estimate of 917 pesos in 2008 is hopelessly outdated in light of this study and in the face of continuing inflation,” she added.

The militant labour group Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), which is not usually invited to the dialogue with the president, is gearing up for Labour Day protest rallies that would include the burning of Aquino’s effigy.

KMU chairman Elmer Labog said the president was condoning increases in the price of utilities as well as oil and other basic goods. He is also pushing for the privatisation of public hospitals. 

 

Jobless growth

“The burden on the Filipino workers and urban poor is getting more and more unbearable because of Aquino’s subservience to the dictates of the United States and of big capitalists cohorts,” Labog said.

Officials of the moderate Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) vowed to raise unmet labour issues and “jobless growth” today’s pre-Labour Day breakfast with Aquino at the Heroes Hall.

In 2012, the Philippines posted a 6.6-per cent gross domestic product growth compared with Thailand’s 6.4 per cent, Indonesia’s 6.2 per cent, Malaysia’s 5.6 per cent, Vietnam’s 5 per cent and Singapore’s 1.2 per cent.

But citing the National Statistics Office, the TUCP said there were 2.89 million unemployed and 7.934 million underemployed Filipinos as of January.