The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) is seeking a legislated across-the-board wage recovery increase of P150 for workers and employees in the private sector nationwide.
“Workers can no longer afford to wait for the regional wage boards to act. Since late last year, TUCP was already calling on the wage boards to address the steady decline in the real value of wages due to surging inflation but TUCP’s call fell on deaf ears. Unfortunately, it seems that workers will be left with an empty bag as the wage boards are taking their sweet time in the face of increasing hunger “ TUCP party-list Representative Raymond Democrito Mendoza.
Mendoza filed House Bill No. 7871, or the “Wage Recovery Act of 2023”.
“The TUCP also recommended win-win policy solutions for workers and employers, such as the provision by employers to their workers of cost-of-living allowances that could be used as a tax credit by the business owners, or a one-time, big-time P5,000 subsidy fromGovernment for minimum and near-minimum wage earners. But our economic managers simply shut the door on these options. In the face of their insensitivity to what is clearly a survival crisis for millions of workers, the TUCP is compelled to file this important bill,” Mendoza said.
He said both workers and businesses were badly hit by the surging inflation and continued to suffer through the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and climate change.
For his part, TUCP vice president Luis Corral said there was a need for wage legislation in the face of the soaring food and electricity prices, as he called out both the Department of Energy and the Energy Regulatory Commission for their “abject failure” to bring down power rates, and the NBI and Customs for their failure to crack down and penalize unscrupulous middlemen, hoarders, and smugglers ruining the food sector, seemingly at will.
“Our workers today are not just trapped in low-quality jobs, their already low wages are further depressed such that the P570 minimum wage in NCR translates to a real value of a measly P482. Filipino workers are becoming a class of the permanently working poor while their children are going to become the next generation of ENDO workers,” Corral added.
Based on February 2023 consumer price index (CPI) figures, the purchasing power lost from the current minimum wages across the regions range from P55 to P89, with the national average lost from daily minimum wages is P73 per day.
“Beyond recovering the purchasing power lost, it is also high time that workers be given an equity supplement for every year since 1989, when R.A. 6727 or the Wage Rationalization Act was enacted, that there was no substantial increase in wages, hence the necessity of an across-the-board P150 wage recovery increase,” Mendoza said.