25,000 'frustrated' workers to march on Labor Day vs govt failure to address poverty, inequality

MANILA, Philippines -- A labor coalition that counts the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines said it will field 25,000 workers, including those from the informal sector, in a Labor Day protest “to express their collective frustration at President Aquino’s failure to initiate policy reforms to address deepening poverty and widening inequality in the country.”

Gerard Seno, vice president of TUCP-Nagkaisa, said in a statement that, on the fifth Labor Day under President Benigno Aquino III, “for the excluded basic social sectors there is still no one in government they can trust or run to. For them as the majority of Filipinos, the message to our President: ‘This is just not acceptable, we can do better’.”

Nagkaisa counts 49 labor groups in the private and public sectors.

The coalition’s May 1 protest will begin with a march from the Welcome Rotonda on Espana to Mendiola for a rally.

Earlier, Nagkaisa member organizations announced they were scrapping the annual Labor Day breakfast dialogue with Aquino over his “failure to deliver the workable and time bound 8-point policy agenda proposed by the group finalized in 2012 designed to mainstream the country’s economic growth down to the grassroots level.”

The 8-point agenda seeks the streamlining of the contractual job scheme, an increase in private and government workers’ wages, a reduction in rates and reliable supply of power, the implementation of an agro-industrial plan to create stable jobs, and the enforcement of the international convention allowing public sector workers to unionize.

“The eight policy issues have been painstakingly tackled and validated by bilateral technical working groups between Nagkaisa labor organizations and the different government agency policy people,” Seno noted. “What the President must do is approve and implement them or veto it altogether but he must not keep these groups waiting.”

Because of Aquino’s perceived inaction, he added, “TUCP-Nagkaisa sees a uniting thread of disengagement from the administration within the basic sectors of our society from labor to the farmers to the urban poor, to the middle class. The feeling that no one in government really cares, that everyone is a victim in system where personal control over their destiny has been lost, that nameless bureaucrats in a faraway, unknown office determine what will be and that each and every Filipino is hopelessly enmeshed in an unchanging political system serving the affluent elite and betraying the destitute millions. They sense that no one is fighting for them.”

Nagkaisa said it has other pending demands: expanding the coverage of tax exemptions, reforming the wage-setting mechanism, passing the Freedom of Information bill, in-city relocation for informal settlers, addressing migrant workers’ concerns, and a quarterly dialogue between workers and the Office of the President.

In the same statement, TUCP-Nagkaisa executive director Louie Corral noted a March survey by Pulse Asia highlighted the fact that four of Filipinos’ top five concerns “relate to the daily survival needs” of people: the high prices of basic needs, low wages, the lack of decent jobs, and the lack of substantial poverty reduction.

The fifth concern was corruption in government.

Corral also accused the administration Liberal Party and the opposition United Nationalist Alliance of “merrily plotting for 2016, “setting up the electoral circus in the hope that we will all forget that the unemployment level has been mired at 7.1 percent, the underemployment rate stuck at 22 percent, and that the daily minimum wage in (the National Capital Region) just increased by P15 from P466 to a still “unliveable” P481.” - InterAksyon.com TV5