DURING today’s third State of the Nation Address of the President, troubled workers and their families expect him to provide ways forward in raising salaries, bringing down prices, ending labor contractualization, making safer workplaces and bringing down unemployment and underemployment.
Faced with the continuing erosion of wages even as prices of basic goods and services continue to surge, workers are hard-up. The poorly paid and without security of tenure workers under contractualized work arrangement practice such as “endo” (end-of-contract) and other fixed-term jobs were not effectively addressed by Executive Order No. 51 but rather continue unabated.
The Department of Labor and Employment has boasted of regularizing 185,000 workers since 2017. However, the regularization happened with the labor contractors and manpower agencies and not with the principal business owners. This proves short-term contractualization of jobs remains widely practiced. Clearly, the President’s promise to end contractualization remains unfulfilled.
During these troubled times, it is crucial that the President — as a leader of this nation and father of the Filipino people – to restore hope to workers and their families and provide a clear framework for our country to move forward. There must be genuine inclusive growth.
Two years into his term, there is an all-time high of 6.7 percent Gross Domestic Product growth. With “Build, Build, Build” there is promise that in the next four years additional employment — decent jobs with decent wages — can be created. But we appeal to the President, in the light of the overall economic predicament of our poorest people now, to consider reform policies which will bring economic relief. Now is the time to take executive actions that would address the root causes of our misery and rally our people toward some pragmatic solutions.
We need the President to restore faith in the future by providing doable policy reforms whereby present living conditions are bettered. Workers should not just be sacrificing but enjoying the fruits of this 6.7 percent growth.
In April 2018, the Philippine Statistics Authority survey showed unemployment stagnant at 40.8 million compared with 40.2 million April 2017. It means there were no new jobs-creating investors putting up factories due to unaddressed problems on expensive electricity, high cost of doing business, poor infrastructures and logistics, legal bureaucracy, poor mass transport system, peace and order problems and worsening traffic congestion.
On other hand, underemployment continues to grow from 6.4 million to seven million. It goes to show that quality of jobs is poor due to rampant practice of temporary “endo” jobs, inadequate salary and social insurance and jobs-skills mismatch.
Workers and their families believe now is the time for the President to translate his “Tunay na Pagbabago” contract with the people.
