The Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) welcomes the 40 billion pesos worth of workers’ benefits announced by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo yesterday but criticized her lack of substantial policy pronouncements on the workers’ demands for full employment that would generate sustainable jobs, for a living wage and for the provision of solid guarantees for workers and trade union rights.
“The President provided long-overdue benefits for the workers but these are just make-over, band-aid solutions to allay workers’ discontent about this administration’s performance to address the worsening jobs crisis,” said Josua Mata, APL Secretary General.
President Arroyo announced on Labor Day the 40-billion peso worth of benefits for the workers that include, among others, standardizing the salaries of government employees and condoning loan surcharges and penalties for members of the Social Security System (SSS) and the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS).
“These are the handiwork of a leader that is an expert in propaganda blitz but sorely amiss in providing structural solutions to the problem,” Mata said.
Mata dismissed the 500 million pesos allotted for training scholarship for call centers and business process outsourcing as symptomatic of the government’s myopic view of the jobs deficit problem.
He said statistics from the Department of Labor and Employment revealed employment opportunities for cyberservices are estimated at 1,383,892 compared with the projected number of 1,791,489 professionals for 2006-2010. Graduates of the various cyberservices disciplines are projected to reach 1,633,605 from 2006 to 2010.
“They are already short by almost 400,000 jobs by 2010 not even counting the number of the existing unemployed workers in this sector,” Mata explained.
APL earlier declared that unemployment is now of crisis proportions and is one of the crimes against the workers committed by the Arroyo administration.
Figures from the National Statistics Office revealed that close to 11 million workers or 30% of the 32-million strong labor force were looking for work in 2005. This number included over four million jobless Filipinos and seven million underemployed workers.
The Bureau of Labor and Employment Services (BLES) Integrated Survey in June 2004 showed non-regular workers accounted for 26% of total employment in establishments with 20 or more workers. In 2004, there were some 628,000 non-regular workers out of a total employment of 2.4 million.
“The proliferation of part-time jobs and higher unemployment undermine the power of workers to bargain for higher wages and demand for security of tenure. Contractual workers are not allowed to join the union. So, Mrs. Arroyo’s appeal to employers to reach a middle ground with workers in granting a wage hike is a hoax,” said Mata.
Mata explained that real wages continue to slide down as the purchasing power of peso continue to decline from P0.79 in January 2005 to P0.74 in January of this year. “No wonder all minimum wage earners live below the poverty threshold,” Mata added.
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