But the Arroyo government refused to expedite it and the wage demand has been overtaken by the skyrocketing prices of basic commodities notwithstanding the much drummed-up strong performance of peso, she said.
IBON studies show the real value of wages has been further devalued.
The actual amount of goods and services P1.00 ($0.02) can buy has fallen to P0.74 ($0.015) in January 2006 from P0.79 ($0.0016) in the same month last year.
These pushed the estimated daily cost of living for a family of six up by 22 percent to P519.23 ($10.51) in the first quarter of the year from P427.03 ($8.65) in the first quarter of last year.
Poverty threshold
By government’s estimate 24.7 percent of the country’s families fell under its annual per capita poverty threshold of P12,267 ($248.50).
This is a rather ludicrous figure compared even to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s 2001 estimate of the country’s poverty line at 40 percent published in their World Fact Book.
Using the international poverty threshold of $2 a day, over 87 percent of the country’s families are poor.
But the IMF-WB (International Monetary Fund-World Bank)’s poverty line of $1a day reduced the country’s poverty level to 10.8 percent of the country’s population, a mere juggling of figures with no meaning for impoverished workers, Ladera said.
The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) is optimistic that the unemployment rate would go down as more jobs would be created by the country’s “sunrise” industries, including call centers, tourism and the real estate industry.
IBON’s job scarcity estimates are significantly higher at 17 million workers or 40 percent of the labor force including migrant workers than government’s official figure of 2.7 million jobless Filipinos.
This is so because government data do not include figures on overseas Filipino workers who left the country to find work and visibly underemployed workers – not to mention productive sectors that have been discouraged to look for work, thus counted as “not in the labor force.”
Continuing workers’ repression
Roman Polintan, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan or New Patriotic Alliance)-Central Luzon chairperson, noted that Arroyo earmarked P725 billion ($14,686,518,788) for debt servicing and P52.4 billion ($1,061,480,806) for military expenditure from the trillion- peso budget for 2006 and passed non-wage economic relief measures for workers who can be removed anytime. Non-wage measures do not have an effect on other benefits such as retirement pay.
“We expect nothing less than a wage increase from Mrs. Arroyo whether the proposed budget for 2007 is approved or the old one is reenacted,” he said before the 2007 budget was passed in Congress.
A KML leader said that in a Labor and Management Conference sponsored by the Management and Labor Center of SBMA in September 2004, held at the Building B of the former Ship Repair Facilities – now its Labor Center – a certain Pastor, a lawyer and acting chief of the SBMA Labor Center announced that in no uncertain terms President Arroyo wants no strike and unionism in any of the country’s economic zones.
“It’s no wonder that workers are prevented from exercising their constitutionally-mandated freedoms. This means escalating police and military intervention and brutality against legitimate protests and the picket lines, and intensified intelligence gathering and anti-worker campaigns at the factory level,” Ladera said.
The spate of political killings nationwide has so far claimed more than 50 labor leaders, trade union and urban poor organizers and advocates, based on data from Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights). In Central Luzon , five labor leaders were killed from January to April this year. Gitnang Luson News Service / Posted by Bulatlat
