By Partido Manggagawa
P10K quarantine pay for 100,000
laid off MEPZ workers — labor group
WE CALL on employers to grant paid quarantine of P10,000 per month to some 100,000 workers affected by the closure of Mactan ecozone as Lapu-Lapu City is locked down today. Foreign investors should shoulder temporary losses due to the covid pandemic.
As far as we know, locators in Mepz are throwing workers out of work without paid quarantine except for Fairchild Semiconductor (Philippines) Inc. which gave wages for the next 20 days that employees will be out of work. Even a giant garments company that supplies to global brands is refusing to give quarantine subsidy to some 17,000 employees and instead only gave a token five kilos of rice with some canned goods. The firm is also applying for the Dole assistance for formal workers. This is a giant company that can very well afford to bear losses by granting quarantine subsidy.
Employers have benefited from recent economic growth without sharing the bounty with their workers. This was revealed in a Department of Finance study showing labor productivity grew by at least 50 percent, yet real wages were stagnant from 2001 to 2016. Moreover, foreign investors in the ecozones enjoyed tax breaks and other privileges for years. Now that there is a crisis, employers are morally obliged not to pass on the burden to their hapless workers.
We cannot accept that workers are the last to benefit from economic progress but the first to sacrifice in time of crisis.
We hereby propose the following mitigation measures to lessen the impact of Covid-19 on workers and the people:
1. Living pension for senior citizens since the elderly are more prone to infection;
2. Shift build-build-build budget to health in order to build more hospitals, provide testing and treatment facilities, hire more health workers;
3. Health tax on the wealthy — as part of Corporate Income Tax and Incentives Rationalization Act — to fund universal health care.