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Friday, June 09, 2006
Ong: Pass the wage bill now!
By Ted Aldwin Ong
THE Labor Alliance for Better Order and Reforms or Labor, a broad alliance of labor organizations has thrown its support to the legislated wage hike as the P125 wage increase bill has passed second reading in the House of Representatives. Members of the Congress are rushing the passage of priority bills before going for a recess by the end of this week.
The wage increase is long delayed especially that prices of basic commodities are increasing with the volatile prices of fuel in the world market. The deregulated oil industry is the single reason why everything is moving in upward direction as far as prices is concerned while wages is moving deep in downward direction hardly able to catch up and adopt with the pace.
It is expected that the capitalist class and the capitalist state has closed ranks to oppose a minute increase of P125 in wages. So different working class has forge unity once again to advance the legislated wage hike that will be a step towards achieving the living wage.
At present, the pending P125 legislated bill will guarantee the workers wage hikes for the next three years with the unorganized workers being the highest beneficiary once the bill is passed. The security of big business in this country is always the main consideration and guaranteed by the government making moves for a wage increase in compromise. This is also the case with the current bill - a compromise formula of a staggered wage hike which provides them allowance to project for the coming years their labor costs.
Definitely, workers need more than what is now provided in the bill but such merely reflects the level and strength of the workers struggle. For workers, the fight is not yet over as they call upon the whole of organized labor to rally round the struggle for a legislated nationwide across-the-board wage hike for all Filipino workers.
The last across the board nationwide legislated wage increase was 17 years ago. Since then, under the regime of wage regionalization, the real wages of workers have fallen and we are worse off today than in 1989.
The 265 percent increase in wages from P89 in 1989 to P325 today pales in comparison to the 342 percent hike in prices in the same period. Even if P45 is added to the minimum wage, it will still be not enough to offset the lost purchasing power over 17 years. Increasing wages to P393 is simply a wage recovery, not even wage increase, since real wages will remain stagnant at the level of 1989 despite all the productivity gains of labor in that period.
The wage boards are not just stingy, they allow capitalists to evade paying the wage hikes through a thousand and one loopholes by providing exemptions for distressed companies, SMEs and enterprises employing 10 workers and less, and capitalists not just facing losses but also those who are facing possible losses. The P125 wage hike will redound to less profit but not business losses. It is time that capitalists sacrifice with less profit for workers have been sacrificing for so long with starvation wages.
The chorus of Ecop, Malacanang and Neda that capitalists cannot pay a P125 wage increase and will result in massive job losses is pure and simple blackmail - a blackmail that has been working for so long and an old tune that we heard since 1989. Yet the economy did not collapse despite the P25 across-the-board nationwide legislated wage hike then.
Today industry and agriculture is indeed collapsing-not from high wages but from the tsunami of globalization. Who will believe in the doomsday scenario of NEDA about a wage hike when it is the same Neda that predicted the emergence of new jobs and lower prices when we open up to globalization?
Why is it that when workers buy the products sold by capitalists, we pay for their actual costs. But when the capitalists buy the labor power of the workers, they refuse to pay for its actual cost-which is the cost of living-and instead they pay only according to their supposed capacity. This is the double standard of capitalism backed up by the national government under the current regime.
It is high time that we pass a bill that will alleviate the worsening standards of labor in the country. In these times of crisis, I don't think that the national government is willing to enter into a situation where organized labor will stand up to demand for what is due to them.
We have seen young workers in France stand up and revolt against its government's anti-labor policies, we might be seeing worse than that as the country wallows deeper into poverty. (Comments to tao.ssi@gmail.com)
(June 9, 2006 issue)
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