BACOLOD City – The General Alliance Workers Association (GAWA) hopes President Rodrigo Duterte in his fifth and penultimate State of the Nation Address (SONA) today would address two important issues – large-scale unemployment and economic recovery.
“With less expectations that the President would give importance to our labor agenda, he should spell out what is the sad and sorry state of the nation amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID -19) crisis and the economic destruction it has inflicted,” GAWA secretary general Wennie Sancho said.
Based on the latest job displacement report of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), 112,414 workers were recorded to have been displaced either due to retrenchment or company closures.
While the economy slowly reopened in June, 2,602 establishments reported to DOLE that they had to let go of their combined 50,589 workers.
Sancho said that for the workers, it is food on the table, shirt on their backs and roof over their heads are the crucial issues that were never mentioned during SONAs.
“It usually supplanted by an exaggeration of economic and political achievement that are merely icing in a cake,” he added.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque earlier said Duterte is expected to discuss “in much detail” the government’s efforts to combat the disease, as well as its plan to help the country recover from the COVID-19 crisis.
“The President will summarize the effects of the [COVID-19] pandemic as well as the responses of the government and the way forward on how the government will actually approach this problem,” Roque told CNN Philippines./PN
