One in 5 firms violate
minimum wage law
One in five firms
violate the minimum wage law, Sen. Ralph Recto said last week.
Last year, 18 per
cent, or 2,921 of the 16,319 firms visited by the Department of Labor and
Employment were found to have violated the minimum wage law, slightly
higher than 2003’s 16 per cent.
Recto called on the
labor department to aggressively monitor the observance of wage laws,
stressing the equal importance of hiking the minimum wage and making sure
that it is properly implemented.
"What use is the
minimum wage law if, like traffic laws, it is violated with impunity?" he
said. Bulatlat
* * *
Sue oil firms for overpricing - IBON
Following
Department of Energy Undersecretary Peter Abaya's
admission that oil companies have already "over-recovered"
P 0.47 per liter for diesel, IBON Foundation urged the government to press
charges against these oil firms.
Ibon,
an independent research institution, last week estimated that oil firms
overpriced petroleum products by
P3.97 per liter in 2004.
Based
on the 52 million
liters per day actual sales for the first nine months of
2004, oil firms may have raked in P6.2 billion on
top of their regular income, the foundation added.
Ibon also urged a
price roll back, which, it said, should also recover overpricings reported
in the past.
Bulatlat
* * *
Consumers urge GMA to reduce inflation
to 3%
Kontra Kulim-VAT
spokesperson Lina Monsod dared President Macapagal-Arroyo’s economic team
to cut down inflation instead of pushing for another Value-added Tax hike.
“The people,
especially the poor, can only take so much. And we very well know
what they are capable of doing,” she said.
Monsod said the
country is now hitting eight to nine per cent inflation, way up the usual
three per cent.
Bulatlat
* * *
Standby tax
power for President is unconstitutional - Bayan
The proposed standby
taxing authority that would grant President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the
power to raise Value-Added Tax is “unconstitutional, treacherous and an
insult to Filipino taxpayers’ collective intellect,” the militant Bagong
Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance) said last week.
“This would allow
Mrs. Arroyo to raise the VAT rate from 10 percent to 12 percent should
collections from the compromise VAT law fail to reach P60 billion, or if
the CPSD (Consolidated Public Sector Deficit) exceeds 1% of Gross Domestic
Product,” Bayan Secretary-General Renato Reyes Jr. said.
But “CPSD has always
exceeded 1 per cent of GDP. Who are they fooling?” Reyes added.
In the Philippines,
taxation powers are only vested in the legislature.
Bulatlat
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