Last Friday, the President took to the airwaves to announce that he was suspending all gambling operations of the PCSO, including Lotto, Keno, Peryahan ng Bayan, and the Small Town Lottery which was intended to supplant the illegal numbers game of jueteng.
It’s not clear how permanent this order will be. One might say that the word “suspension” inherently means it will be lifted someday. And in fact the President singled out collusion between gambling operators and corrupt PCSO officials as the proximate reason for his action. The Commission on Audit has also weighed in with the disclosure that over P8 billion of dividends have not yet been paid by PCSO to government. Whenever these issues are settled, gambling might resume.
But one might also argue that President Rodrigo Duterte had no choice but to simply suspend, since a permanent end to PCSO’s gambling operations would require amending its corporate charter or some other form of enabling legislation. In the end, as with everything else he plans to do, the permanence of this action will boil down to what is truly in his heart about what’s best for his people.
The long-term ramifications go well beyond the statutory. The biggest one is what will happen to the billions of pesos worth of charity doled out every year by PCSO from its gambling revenues. Upon reflection, though, one might argue that the bulk of that charity going to the poor is actually being funded by the same poor who make up the bulk of PCSO’s small-time gamblers. Money that doesn’t go into bets is money that becomes available for medical emergencies.
Other critics claim that this suspension discriminates against poor gamblers in favor of the well-off local and foreign patrons of the casinos run or overseen by PAGCOR. Some personal favoritism has also been alleged in light of Duterte’s repeated praise during his SONA for PAGCOR chairman and CEO Didi Domingo, his alphabetical seatmate during his years in Congress.
This criticism begs the question of whether it’s a good or a bad thing to limit a social vice like gambling to the rich who can afford it, while keeping it away from the poor who cannot. And in any case, as in Singapore, government can always grant special permits to local residents who want to rub shoulders with foreign gamblers.
The most pernicious criticism claims that gambling is a necessary vice for the poor who have little else in life, which is why it has become such an ingrained fixture of the culture. This kind of patronizing permissiveness is also what underlies self-serving opinions that the poor are somehow “entitled” to do drugs because their lives are so hard, or that Filipino husbands are somehow “allowed” to philander because of our machismo.
If Duterte intends to root out small-time gambling for good as part and parcel of the moral corruption of the grassroots that he railed against in SONA, then—as I said in these pages last week—it’s a crusade that ought to be supported by moral exemplars like the Church, no matter what’s divided the two before. It’s in joint action, not in theology, where common ground can be found.
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Also last weekend, the President dropped another bombshell by vetoing the long-pending bill to end contractualization of labor, or endo. It was a decision that had the fingerprints of his economic team all over it.
Predictably, the labor unions, the reds and yellows, and like-minded activists are up in arms over this veto. And again, their criticism will be rooted in what is merely ideological or sentimental, and not what is sound economic thinking.
Guaranteed permanent employment, as well as guaranteed minimum wages, contribute to what’s been called rigid or inflexible labor markets. And in today’s global economy where both capital and labor are unprecedentedly mobile, an inflexible labor market in our country only helps push foreign—and even, not surprisingly, local—investors to set up shop instead in our neighbors.
The right to fire can never be separated from the right to hire. An employee’s productivity and fitness for continuing employment can never be determined until he’s actually spent enough time on his job. And there is no lack of special situations where the labor requirement is only temporary, or transient, or seasonal—from one-off projects of consultants and contractors, to Christmas holiday shopping for retailers, to emergency situations of all sorts.
Millennials are a lot more accustomed than their elders to the impermanence of their future, one where they depend mainly on themselves and their skills and continuous learning to make their way upward, not on the largesse of employers. It’s a world view that also suits the digitally-based businesses of tomorrow, where nimbleness and flexibility in costs are key in competing with rivals all over the world.
If the unions truly want to improve wages and benefits of their members, they might wish to look into my suggestion some weeks back to limit the number of paid holidays—either by legislation or by constitutional amendment—to just one a month or 12 a year. This brings us down from our current 21-22 holidays a year to the global average of just 11. In a trillion-peso economy like ours, I calculate that the additional production from those extra days can cover even the fantastical minimum wage demand of P16,000 per month being pushed by the leftists.
It boils down to what we’re willing to do by ourselves in order to earn a better life for ourselves. Can we agree to work an extra day a month? To forego gambling and instead save up more against future emergencies? To improve our job situations by continually improving and learning more on the job instead of forcing employers to keep us on board whether or not we’re good enough, whether or not the business is doing well?
These are questions even the President can’t help us answer. We have to decide for ourselves whether or not we’re willing to work as hard and as smart as our neighbors whom we love to envy.
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All three readings today speak of the Lord’s righteous anger as the companion in justice of His compassion and mercy. In Exodus 34: 5-9, Moses appeals to God to pardon “the wickedness and sinfulness of His stiff-necked people.” And at the beginning of Psalm103, David sings of both the Lord’s slowness to anger, for “He knows how we are formed, remembers that we are dust.”
In the Gospel (Matthew 13: 36-43), Jesus’ parable of the weed warns that the weeds in the field are “the children of the evil one” who will be “thrown into the fiery furnace at the end of the age.” In earlier verses, though (24-30), the master of the field also cautions his servants not to pull up the weeds yet because they might also uproot the wheat. “Let them grow together until harvest,” when the wheat is gathered into the barn but the weeds are burned. Let us wait until the end of the age.
There is no choice for God but to be merciful to us, as any father has no choice but to be compassionate even with his errant children. But no good father can be infinitely compassionate if he also wants to teach his children right from wrong. We are continually being taught this difference every day, if we listen to the Father, and if in the end we are burned and not gathered into the barn, that will be our undoing and not His doing.
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