Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri on Monday said they will lower the P150 legislated wage hike earlier approved at the Senate committee level and instead push for a P100 across-the-board increase.
“We already approved the P150 wage hike increase on the committee level under Senator Jinggoy Estrada, being the chairperson of the Committee on Labor,” said Zubiri in a television interview.
The proposed P100 legislated wage increase, Zubiri said, would be on top of the P40 wage hike in the National Capital Region approved by the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board (RTWPB).
“So what we could do is we could amend it and come up with the committee report proposing a P100 additional minimum wage increase for our workers,” Zubiri said.
Zubiri said is optimistic that the P100 legislated wage increase would pass into law since all his fellow senators support the measure.
“You know their claim is always that we have the second highest minimum wage in Southeast Asia. That’s no longer true. Indonesia has already gone over P800. I think they’re about P830 per day. Malaysia is already I think P890, close to P900 per day. Of course, Singapore has a minimum monthly income, which is tens of thousands of Singapore dollars. So we’re no longer second highest,” he said.
“Vietnam is about P510 pesos per day, we are at P580 but remember that Vietnam has no deductions. They are a communist country. They don’t need to contribute to Pag-Ibig. They don’t need to contribute to Philhealth because their housing is free. The hospitals are free,” he added.
In the Philippines, Zubiri said deductions from the wage of workers range from P45 to P50 a day.
For its part, the research group IBON said the P40 wage hike approved for the NCR remains a far cry from what labor groups demand and “certainly much less than what Filipino workers need and deserve.”
“The real value of the NCR minimum wage or adjusting for inflation is still lower than the highest it reached four-and-a-half years ago.
Computed at constant 2018 prices for comparability, the real value of the new wage is around P516 which is still less than the peak P538 reached in December 2016,” IBON said.
The biggest labor group, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) said the P40 wage hike was “too little, too late.”
“After a very long wait for much-needed relief from the skyrocketing cost of basic goods and services, the paltry P40 increase in the NCR daily minimum wage amounts to almost nothing. It is not even half of the P88 already lost to inflation from the purchasing power of the current P570 NCR daily minimum wage,” TUCP Vice President Luis Corral said.
“To justify and assert that P40 is enough since the daily minimum wage should be a mere safety net and different from a living wage is atrocious in the face of the daily struggle to merely survive,” Corral added.