LABOR groups sought President Rodrigo Duterte’s intervention for a “substantial” wage increase for some 4 million wage earners in Metro Manila, after a consultation on Monday with the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board-National Capital Region (RTWPB-NCR).
Representatives of the Associated Labor Unions-Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (ALU-TUCP) submitted during the meeting a supplementary position paper amending its original P320 daily wage hike petition filed in June 2018 to P334 a day.
ALU-TUCP Vice President Louie Corral admitted that the petition for a substantial wage increase was unlikely to be granted, saying that “the NCR regional wage boards were just being polite, perfunctory and routine and just wanted to get over it.”
“It looks like the NCR wage board is not sure about its full mandate. These are times of economic hardship and difficulty for workers in a supposedly growing economy. We fear that what we encountered today are wage board members who don’t want to take real responsibility and make the hard decisions for fairness and decency,” Corral said.
Amid rising prices of goods and cost of services, the President should intervene in the wage issue, he said, adding it might be mishandled and result in a backlash against the Duterte government.
“We therefore call on the President to lead from the front on the wage petition issue. Workers are already barely surviving on their daily minimum wages,” Corral said.
Corral claimed that economic managers were pre-empting the wage board deliberations and misleading the President by saying that a substantial wage increase would be inflationary.
Inflation, however, was caused by profiteers and cartels in electricity, petroleum and rice, as well as the excise tax and value-added tax on power and oil, he said.
Metro Manila workers recieve P512 minimum wage a day. The real value or purchasing power of the minimum wage, however, has fallen to P340 a day, the group said.
The last wage increase, amounting to P21 per day, was granted to minimum-wage earners in Metro Manila on Oct. 5, 2017, out of the original petition of P184 per day.
It brought the daily minimum wage rate in the private sector to P512 from P491.
ALU-TUCP has also sought from the government a P500 monthly grocery subsidy for minimum-wage earners to help them cope with rising inflation and eroding wages.
Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello 3rd said he had recommended a P200 subsidy to the President, subject to the approval of the Departments of Finance and of Budget and Management.