INSTEAD of fulfilling his promise, President Duterte essentially downgraded the teaching profession as teachers are now officially the lowest-paid professionals under the Salary Standardization Law (SSL) V. This year, police, military personnel, and nurses will enjoy a basic pay of about P30,000 but teachers will scrimp on a meager P22,316.
President Duterte’s latest defense of doubling the basic pay of uniformed personnel and not doing the same for teachers reveals his awfully poor appreciation of the teaching profession. He admittedly and unapologetically gives more weight to his wars, which he thinks would perpetuate him in power, than to the future of the youth and the nation. He shortsightedly claimed that the country is a “troubled land” and thus needs soldiers who are prepared to die for the country but does not recognize that poverty and underdevelopment lays at the core of the armed conflict in the country. He fails to see the important role of providing free and quality education, consequently of the teaching profession too, in achieving peace and progress in the Philippines.
The injustice in government pay continues with SSL V. The Duterte administration attempts to deodorize the government’s problematic salary scheme by deceptively claiming that this new law prioritizes rank-and-file employees over top officials, with professionals getting the highest percentage raise of 30 percent and the highest salary grades getting the lowest rates of increase at eight percent. However, the meager increases spread in four years will do nothing to resolve the distorted and grossly inequitable government pay, dramatically worsened by SSL 4 which provided for 186-233 percent increase for top officials, while only giving 11–23 percent raise for rank-and-file employees. More importantly, the new SSL will keep public workers’ pay below livable and decent levels for the next 4 years, with the increases hardly covering hikes in the prices of goods and commodities, as well as in additional taxes and mandatory contributions. The same will continue to persist as long as SSL is in place, as its legislation in 1989 ensured an undemocratic salary scheme wherein rank-and-file employees who compose the vast majority of state workers have no bargaining power, and only top officials and economic managers get to decide the fate of millions of workers and their families.
Such further reveals the true character of the Duterte administration. It has no real interest in uplifting the lives of its workers, and of the rest of the Filipinos. The derisory compensation it provides state workers impresses clearly how it values its civilian workers and the government’s very mandate to the people. The doubling of the pay of his machineries for fascism — the police and the military — while failing to do the same for the state’s machinery for social service delivery, or the rank-and-file employees, is in itself a strong statement to the President’s priorities and interests. To further exemplify this, the 2020 budget, set to be signed in the next few days, saw huge cuts in education, health, housing, and other services while allocations for war and corruption were increased manyfold.
Hence, the fight for decent pay and better services remains to be ever relevant and just. Teachers, other state workers, and the rest of the Filipino people will hold to account the Duterte administration for its failure to uphold the interests of the majority. As the anti-people, self-serving, and war-mongering Duterte government continue to unfold, so will the people persist in the struggle for rights and welfare, and for social justice. – JOSELYN MARTINEZ, national chairperson, Alliance of Concerned Teachers < act.publicinfo@gmail.com>
