Workers have absolutely no use for the pittance allocated by the various regional wage boards in response to the widespread calls for a legislated wage hike from organized labor.

The regional wage boards are again proving themselves incompetent and insensitive to workers’ plight by approving measly amounts, P15 in Cebu and P25 in the NCR, in obvious deference to capitalist and employers’ interests. This comes as no surprise since wage boards have time and again proven that it is incapable of living up to its mandate of ensuring workers’ fair share in the fruits of their labor. Instead, the regional wage boards have done nothing but keep workers’ wages below poverty levels!

Amidst the context of never-ending oil price increases and government’s continued insistence on imposing onerous taxes such as the revised VAT system which will further strain the already depleted workers’ pockets, the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) reiterates its call for a living wage for all workers.

Living wage estimates for March 2005 reveal that a family of six needs at least P663 a day in the NCR and P638 per day in Cebu.

Despite the growing gap between the actual minimum wage and living wage levels, the Regional Wage Boards even managed to pull out a totally unacceptable figure.

To add insult to injury, only a handful of workers, if any at all, would actually enjoy the promised wage increase! After all, the wage order released by the NCR RTWPB merely calls for a “minimum wage adjustment.” This means that only those earning a basic salary of P250 per day are entitled to the said adjustment. Furthermore, the wage order contains numerous exemptions that, coupled with the existing Barangay Micro-Business Enterprise (BMBE) law that automatically exempts from paying the minimum wage all micro-enterprises with a capitalization of less than 3 million, would exclude at least 90% of all workers. Lastly, significant portions of employers do not comply with the minimum wage laws!

Now would be the best time to abolish the regional wage boards!

If the National Labor Relations Commission is truly to be of service to the hundreds of thousands of workers whose cases continue to rot in its case files, then the whole roster of its commissioners should follow Señeres’s example and resign en masse to pave the way for the abolition of the NLRC.

This in essence was how the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) reacted to news of NLRC Commissioner Roy Señeres’s resignation from the labor body.

“Señeres should have quit a long time ago,” said APL Chairperson Daniel L. Edralin, adding “since his appointment as NLRC Commissioner, we have no reason to believe he was able to rid the agency of corruption nor was he able to speed up the resolution of labor disputes.”

Edralin said the NLRC was notorious for taking a long time to resolve labor cases filed before it, and reports suggest that decisions are, in a considerable number of instances, up for sale.

What Edralin proposed is for the 14 other NLRC Commissioners to resign to pave the way for the NLRC abolition and the reform of the entire labor dispute settlement system in the country.

“The labor dispute settlement system is too legalistic,” Edralin added, “making the delivery of resolutions to labor cases harder and longer, further opening the floodgates for collusion and corruption,” he added.

“We want a single entry point for all labor cases instead of the current practice where workers can sometimes lose cases because of ‘forum shopping.’ We want our labor dispute settlement system to have mediation as the backbone, to employ professional and highly-trained and competent arbiters and to eliminate expensive layers of appeals and provide a direct recourse to the Supreme Court instead,” Edralin enumerated. “These features are actually contained in House Bill 3970 which is being pushed in the House of Representatives by the APL together with Akbayan and Rep. Del De Guzman,” Edralin explained.

Edralin dared Malacañang to certify the bill as urgent along with other labor-related measures now pending in both houses of Congress.

AKBAYAN and the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) today picketed the House of Representatives to express strong opposition to the Anti-Terrorism Bill and the National ID System. Calling the legislative proposals “terror bills,” AKBAYAN and APL called for greater vigilance to prevent the passage of these measures.

AKBAYAN President Ronald Llamas chided the Arroyo administration for repeatedly raising the specter of terrorism to justify the most repressive and draconian policies. “The Anti-Terror bill is a form of social control that is intrusive and violates fundamental human rights,” Llamas said.

Referring to the administration’s latest effort on the so-called “war against terror,” Llamas said that Pres. Arroyo risks further losing the people’s confidence because of irrational measures like the Anti-Terrorism Bill. “The very vague definition of terrorism in the bill would allow the state and unscrupulous private entities to violate people’s rights. The bill brings back the nightmare that was Martial Law,” Llamas explained.

Josua Mata of APL maintains that the bill is not only acceptable but fundamentally flawed. “For instance constitutionally-guaranteed rights pertaining to warrantless arrests and detention are being trampled upon in the name of security,” Mata stressed.

The Anti-terrorism Bill also authorizes freezing of suspected terrorists’ assets and maintenance of wiretaps on electronic communications. “With this (Anti-Terrorism Bill), the government has all the tools needed to conduct the most massive assault on human rights,” Mata said.

The proposed measures, according to the two groups, terrorize rather than protect.

May 12, 2005
The passage of the bill amending the VAT rate system is almost a done deal. But this does not preclude the idea of further challenging the legitimacy of this onerous tax to be imposed on workers and the toiling masses in general.

We are specifically aghast at the bicameral conference committee report’s provision assigning the authority to the Executive to raise the VAT rate from the maintained 10% to 12%. Not only does this blur the line between separation of powers, this is a false safety net designed to assuage fears over the fact that the VAT rate will indeed go up to 12% and cover more products and services.

The proposed bicameral version proposes that this rate increase will only be implemented by January 1, 2006 if two conditions are met, that is, if VAT collection as a percentage of GDP exceeds 2.5%, and if VAT collection as a percentage of the national government debt exceeds 1.5%.

The truth, however, is that as of 2003, VAT collection as a percentage of GDP has already reached almost 2%, and growing by an average of 0.2% every year. Meanwhile VAT collection as a percentage of the government debt has already reached 3.84% as of 2004. This provision therefore is intentionally misleading and purely procedural since it is a certainty that these requirements will be met.

The ‘no-pass-on’ provision was also deleted at the bicameral level, thus unmasking lawmakers’ insensitivity to the need to provide at least some semblance of safety measure against the VAT rate finding their way to consumers’ electricity bills. And even then, one cannot be assured that workers and the public in general won’t end up paying for the VAT increase, since the VAT system has always been beleaguered with implementation problems.

The current version left out the exemption on imported coal which remains the primary source of power generation, and it has lifted the exemption on power transmission and distribution, so our lawmakers expect workers to just sit idly by and welcome this draconian measure with open arms, when in fact this will send electricity prices through the roof.

What this all means is that the legislature has not only failed to heed the widespread calls for the rejection of the VAT as a measure to address the looming fiscal crisis. It has also abandoned any pretension of protecting workers’ interests with the mangled and horribly disfigured version of the VAT bill now up for approval.

But our lawmakers pass this measure at their own risk. There will be a backlash to this travesty of people’s rights. The bottom line is, when people receive the billing statement for this idiotic measure, the protests and massive discontent already evidenced by the street protests against this measure will surely more than double. And those who are about to sell the interests of workers ad the general public will pay for this sell-out through the streets and through the ballot.

May 2, 2005
If President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo were truly interested in promoting workers’ rights and advancing their demands, then she would have long ago addressed workers’ concerns instead of again using these to try to have some kind of glossy packaging for her Labor Day speech. Arroyo’s words are therefore to be met with grave suspicion.

In the first place, if she truly wanted to listen to the grievances of more than 20,000 protesting workers and other sectors at the Welcome Rotunda yesterday, then why send instead about a thousand policemen, three personnel trucks and two fire-trucks against a peaceful assembly where workers were exercising their legitimate and constitutional right to seek redress and express their opinions?

We denounce the unjustified, illegal and overkill use of police forces to block a peaceful assembly from proceeding to Mendiola, with the police beating up protestors.

Because of this refusal to truly listen and hear what workers want, GMA again commits a faux pas when she said that she would order the regional wage boards to decide by the end of May how much minimum wage adjustments would be given to workers everywhere. She is obviously ignorant of the workers’ demands that a wage increase in itself would not suffice. This is again nothing more than a political gimmick aimed at dampening the growing public disgust over government’s inability to control unemployment, decreasing incomes and the rising costs of utilities and therefore of living.

What is needed is not a minimum wage adjustment in the regional level but the establishment of a singular minimum wage level at the national level that approximates the constitutional mandate for a living wage. Any minimum wage increase granted through the inutile wage boards would be practically useless. Experience shows that only a handful of workers, if any at all, actually benefited from wage orders issued by the wage boards because these are not implemented across the board and contain too many exemptions that automatically excludes at least 90% of the working people. Worse, the Barangay Micro-Business Enterprise law (BMPE) also excludes workers in micro-enterprises.

Any amount of minimum wage adjustment will never suffice so long as government does not at the same time control oil prices, and water and electricity rates. And if PGMA would have her way, an increased and expanded VAT would wipe out not only any gain in terms of wage increase, but make workers even poorer than before.

Secondly, putting the National Labor Relations Commission under an equally inept Labor Secretary does not ensure the speedy and fair adjudication of labor disputes. The NLRC should be abolished, the settlement of labor disputes simplified through a one-stop shop for labor disputes instead.

Thus GMA’s pronouncements are grossly misinformed, patronizing and ineffectual measures designed only to attempt to show that she also have a labor agenda but which had been exposed as illusory, desperately wanting in substance and pure gimmickry.

And with her empty promises, it comes not as a surprise anymore should GMA find herself unable to dash towards the end of her six-year term. This administration is unraveling at the seams, increasingly unable to bear the weight of its own incompetence and bankruptcy.