 |
| Labor Secretary Bienvenido Laguesma |
The labor group
Kapatiran ng mga Unyon at Samahang Manggagawa (Kapatiran) welcomed the
statement by Labor Secretary Bienvenido Laguesma that the government is
reviewing the P100 wage hike petition even as it asserted that it had not been
consulted by the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) on the matter.
Kapatiran is asking
the DOLE to immediately convene a tripartite meeting to discuss the wage
increase as a response to the cost-of-living crisis. Labor Secretary Laguesma
stated the other day that the DOLE is studying the wage petition and is
conducting consultations.
“We call on Labor
Secretary Laguesma to hold a tripartite meeting on the wage hike petition,”
demanded Rey Almendras, president of Kapatiran and union president of the
Philip Morris Fortune Tobacco Labor Union.
He added that “As the
petitioner for the P100 wage increase in the National Capital Region (NCR) wage
board, Kapatiran expects to be among the groups consulted. Unless Secretary
Laguesma is only holding dialogues with employers not workers. Especially since
he seemed very concerned that the government needs to do a balancing act over
the wage hike demand. Why is it that the government is overly worried about the
capacity to pay of employers and not the capacity to buy of workers?”
Kapatiran filed a
petition for a P100 minimum wage hike at the NCR wage board on December 6,
2022. The group argued that workers need to recover the eroded purchasing power
of wages. “Kapatiran calls on other labor groups to link up arms in order to
win war—that is, wage increase for wage recovery,” declared Almendras.
Runaway inflation has
already cut P88 from the P570 minimum wage of NCR workers according to a
computation by Partido Manggagawa (PM) based on the latest consumer price index
data of the Philippine Statistics Authority. Inflation in January this year
rose to 8.7%, much higher than the 8.1% in December.
“We call for a new
round of wage hikes to recover the lost purchasing power of workers not just in
Metro Manila but in the whole country due to the surge in inflation. The P33
minimum wage hike in June 2022 has been effectively wiped out by runaway
inflation and workers’ real wages have pushed back even further,” asserted Rene
Magtubo, PM national chair and a city councilor of Marikina.
The group clarified that the wage hike demand is merely wage recovery. “We are not yet even talking of workers claiming a just share in the fruits of their labor. From 2001 to 2016, real wages stagnated but labor productivity increased by 50% and the GDP doubled,” Magtubo maintained.
February 13, 2023
Kapatiran ng mga Unyon at Samahang Manggagawa
No comments:
Post a Comment