Despite
the economy sustaining its recovery from the recession induced by the pandemic,
workers nonetheless faced a worsening incomes and jobs crisis in 2022. Thus,
while small businesses were slowly recuperating, formal and informal workers
continued bleeding from wage and income erosion, job losses, and a fall in
employment quality.
Inflation
ratcheted up for the whole year, from 3.0% in January 2022 to 8.0% in November.
No doubt prices rose even more in December. By October 2022, the 7.7% inflation
had cut P76 off the P570 minimum wage of workers in Metro Manila since the
latest wage order was implemented on June 4, 2022. This meant that the P33
minimum wage increase in June had effectively been eradicated by year’s end and
further that workers were owed more. Inflation was even worse outside Metro
Manila. This led to the clamor from the labor movement by the last quarter of
2022 for a new salary hike.
Partido
ng Manggagawa called for a P100 nationwide across-the-board legislated increase
while the labor group Kapatiran ng mga Unyon at Samahang Manggagawa filed a
petition for a P100 minimum wage hike in the NCR wage hike early this month.
The Employers Confederation of the Philippines opposed a wage hike using the
disingenuous argument that MSMEs cannot afford it. Despite runaway inflation,
the government played deaf to the demand and stuck to the myth that there was
no supervening condition that existed to warrant a new round of wage hikes.
The
government trumpeted the return of employment figures to pre-pandemic levels.
By October 2022, unemployment was at 4.5%, exactly the same rate as in October
2019 before COVID-19 struck. But while the quantity of jobs may have returned,
the quality of jobs worsened. More people were working part-time instead of
full-time. Underemployment—or the people wanting more hours of work—jumped from
13.0% in October 2019 or 5.62 million Filipinos to 14.2% in October 2022 or
6.67 million. This translates to more than a million Filipinos working as
casual, contractual or informal in 2022 or a rise of 19% compared to
pre-pandemic levels of underemployment.
As
part-time employees working as casual, contractual or informal, they would be
suffering from lower remuneration, not enough benefits, less job security, lack
of social security and unsafe working conditions. In other words, these
employed but vulnerable workers in the post-pandemic context are still harmed
by decent work deficits. More Filipinos are back to work but in bad jobs.
A
reflection of this phenomenon is revealed in the plight of delivery riders. No
doubt, there were more of them as essential workers during the pandemic. But an
upsurge of protests among delivery riders express the decent work deficits of
Filipinos working as independent contractors rather than as full-time regular
employees. Almost all of these protests originated from grievances over steep
declines in incomes as app arbitrarily cut their “commissions” while the cost
of fuel rose continuously. This contradiction exposes the risks of app-based
work where part of the business costs has been passed on to so-called
freelancers while platforms continue to exercise control over their work. This
year, Grab riders in General Santos, Cebu and Pampanga, together with Grab
cyclists in Metro Manila, all held mass actions to highlight their demands. In
a pioneering initiative, the Iloilo Grab Riders Union was formed in November,
which will test the employee-employment relationship between workers and the
apps.
While
the unemployment may have been to normal—which is not saying much—the
hemorrhage of jobs continues. In September 2022, some 4,000 workers across the
five factories of the Sports City group of companies in the Mactan Economic
Zone were laid off, arguably the biggest mass termination this year. That the
mother of all layoffs at Sports City was not a one-time, big-time event was
confirmed by the industry association CONWEP which stated in October 2022 that
up to 4% of the 270,000 apparel workers have been laid off this year.
Workers
in export zones such as garment and electronics are especially at risk due to
global supply chain disruptions. With the threat
of a government dipping its fingers on their pension funds and prospects of a
global recession ever higher, Filipino workers should brace for bad rather than
good tidings next year.
Partido Manggagawa
December 27, 2022
