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GMA did not announce a minimum wage increase on Labor
Day this year. Instead, she has asked the wage boards to work
“overtime” to decide on pending wage-increase petitions. It will
be interesting to see how the wage boards will resolve the minimum
wage issue this year given the upward spiral in fuel and rice
prices. With the president’s now legendary micro-management on the
matter, I’m quite sure increases will be granted all around.
But would this be a good thing?
By itself, I don’t think so. Lest I be misunderstood, I must make
my position clear that the workers must be paid more. But the
trouble with focusing too much on the minimum wage is that first, it
conditions companies to think that they’re paying workers fairly
as long as they pay the minimum wage. We must note that the minimum
wage is not a living wage and, therefore, cannot support a decent
life.
Second, the emphasis on the
minimum wage hides the need for a better partnership between labor
and capital owners for mutual prosperity. Such a partnership is
envisioned by the constitution and is in the best interests of
everyone. A minimum wage increase can help alleviate the short-term
needs of a cash-strapped working class. By itself, however, it
threatens to make the industrial situation worse as resentful
companies resort to inventive contractual arrangements to deprive
even more workers of job security and social protection benefits.
Some companies will not even be subtle about it. They will just
violate the minimum wage law and brace themselves for the penalties.
They figure they will still come out ahead.
The paradoxical situation is that
as the minimum wage increases, more companies learn to cope with the
additional costs by using work arrangements that render workers even
more insecure and miserable than before. How do we escape this
self-defeating paradox? Where else should higher worker pay come
from aside from an increase in minimum wage? It should come from
increased worker productivity, of course. And who should be the main
agent for enabling such an increased productivity? It can only be
managers.
The need for improving the
productivity of Filipino workers has been recognized for a long
time. Unfortunately, the solution that has been adopted by most
companies to improve worker-productivity is to keep pay and benefits
low. This seems reasonable on the face of it. After all, getting
more revenues while keeping labor costs as low as possible is
considered “best practice” in our retail and fast-food sectors.
But this is bad management and a waste of precious human capital.
How can managers take pride in using business strategies which can
only work by keeping workers cheap and desperate? Managers have to
snap out of this unimaginative, exploitative and ultimately
self-defeating approach to worker productivity.
Gary Hamel, writing in The Future
of Management, deplored the tendency of managers to treat workers as
expensive entities to subjugate rather than creative partners to be
productively engaged for the benefit of the company. He observed
that “the machinery of modern management gets fractious,
opinionated, and free-spirited human beings to conform to standards
and rules, but in so doing it squanders prodigious quantities of
human imagination and initiative. It brings discipline to
operations, but imperils organizational adaptability. It multiplies
the purchasing power of consumers the world over, but also enslaves
millions in quasi-feudal, top-down organizations.”
Is this the best that management
can do?
(To be continued)
Dr. Ben Teehankee is the Sen.
Benigno Aquino Jr. associate professor of corporate social
responsibility and governance and chairman of the human resource
management department of the De La Salle Professional Schools Ramon
V. del Rosario Sr. Graduate School of Business. He may be emailed at
teehankeeb@yahoo.com
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