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| Photo by SunStar |
The labor group Partido Manggagawa (PM) called on employers to
grant paid quarantine of P10,000 per month to workers to be affected by the
impending closure of businesses in the province and city of Cebu, and the
Mactan ecozone in Lapu-Lapu. “Local employers and foreign investors should shoulder
temporary losses due to the covid pandemic,” asserted
Dennis Derige, PM-Cebu spokesperson.
The province of Cebu is imposing a lockdown
starting tomorrow while Cebu City is doing so on Saturday and Lapu-Lapu on Sunday.
The shutdown of the Mactan Economic Zone (MEZ) alone will lead to the loss of
jobs of some 100,000 workers.
“There are already a number of locators in MEZ that
are closing ahead of Sunday and all 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 is 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.” Derige explained.
He added that “Employers,
including tourism businesses, 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.”
Derige insisted that “We cannot accept that
workers are the last to benefit from economic progress but the first to
sacrifice in time of crisis.”
The group is proposing the following mitigation
measures to lessen the impact of covid 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 CITIRA—to fund universal health care.
March 26, 2020
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