AS we joined the world in celebrating May 1 or International Labor Day, it is worth discussing the poor’s bigger problem, which is not low wages or security of tenure but widespread joblessness, and underemployment, resulting in widespread poverty.
• More “labor pains” in joblessness. Organized labor enjoys the voice to push for its rights and bargain for more benefits, but with widespread labor contracting, the unorganized labor shares maybe 95 percent of total labor force.
Rightfully, organized labor groups can assert their rights and demand what is due them by law, but sadly the unorganized are silenced by the fear of losing employment with the institutionalized labor contract’s automatic firing before reaching six months, beyond which employers are forced to hire them as regulars.
By itself, labor contracting, popularly known locally as endo (a colloquial term for end of contract) must be reformed or modified as it is restricting indirectly the growth of investments and capital expenditures like housing and consumer durables, which are dependent on longer-term financing. A young couple, without stable long-term jobs, cannot qualify for financing and will never risk getting a house on financing. Labor contracting must, therefore, be modified to bring back regular employment, without the “unconditional security of tenure” to allow employers to fire incompetents.
But the bigger problem that must be addressed is joblessness, which breeds the ranks of the lumpen proletariat, or the dregs of society, many of whom end up in crimes, drugs, prostitution and in various odd jobs to survive like street hawking, watch-your-car boys, sidewalk vendors, transport barkers, etc.
• Truth on jobs and what “lies” ahead? Employment rate as of January 2018 was at 94.7 percent, a notch higher than January 2017’s 93.4 percent, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) says. So, conversely, unemployment rate was at 5.3 percent, down from 6.6 percent for the same period.
However, lower unemployment is not something to rejoice for many reasons. For one, underemployment increased from 16.3 percent to 18 percent, which means more people are looking for jobs and feeling the pinch of poverty.
Second, statistics may be misleading, to quote Sir Robert Giffen (1837-1910), who said there are “three kinds of liars—ordinary liars, outrageous liars and scientific experts, and therefore three types of lies—1) usual lies, 2) outrageous lies and 3) statistics.” Imagine, if one worked even for just one hour in the past week, when the survey was done, one is already counted by the government as employed.
• Not quite over Kuwait. The recent diplomatic faux pas over the video publicity of our embassy’s rescue efforts on exploited Filipina workers makes us reflect on the root causes of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) phenomenon, or why there are now 11 million to 12 million Filipinos abroad as migrants or contract workers.
While we can’t provide jobs yet for our OFWs, we need to be firm yet cautious in dealing with host countries like Kuwait. For political reasons, Foreign Secretary Alan Peter S. Cayetano may have wanted to play hero by allowing the posting on social media of the rescue effort, which embarrassed Kuwait, putting at stake our 252,000 OFWs, mostly maids, in Kuwait.
It is quite naïve for us to be too arrogantly belligerent when we do not really have the leverage as virtual beggars for employment with our open policy exporting manpower. What if Middle East countries unite behind Kuwait and ban all Filipino workers, that would mean displacing close to 2.5 million Filipino workers.
• Key to poverty alleviation. The reason 10 percent of Filipinos are permanent migrant citizens and workers abroad is because of the lack of jobs and widespread poverty in the Philippines.
Poverty we see in the urban poor is nothing to rural poverty, which shares 76 percent of those living below the poverty line. Poverty incidence among the urban poor is only about 11.5 percent in 2015, while poverty among farmers is 34.3 percent and among fisherfolks at 34 percent. Thus, their children have been pushed into the massive rural-to-urban migration as they try to escape from rural misery only to end up shackled in urban poverty.
Many of them eventually try their luck abroad. Meanwhile, left behind are the farmer parents, who now average about 59 years old, increasingly no longer strong enough to toil the farms.
And to keep the youth in the farms, farming must become more lucrative, modernized and exciting. Industrial manufacturing jobs are ideal, but because they are lacking and only based in few industrial zones, the better alternative is to develop agriculture and agro-processing to wipe out rural poverty.
• Learn from FDR in creating jobs. We can learn a lot from great leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who created 4 million jobs in a month’s time as discussed in Nick Taylor’s book When FDR Put the Nation to Work.
Taylor estimates that the 4 million targeted jobs are equivalent to 9.6 million jobs by 2010 alone. FDR got maverick Harry Hopkins, who allegedly started work on his first day even without an office, but just grabbed a chair and a desk in the hallway, and within two hours issued over $5 million “grants” to eight states. He approved 100 projects a day, and the Bureau of Printing had to go three shifts to print more checks.
FDR’s “New Deal” had many programs, one of which was Civilian Conservation Corps, which herded thousands of jobless people from the cities into training camps, where they learned literacy and skills like carpentry, plumbing, etc. and made to build roads, sewers, dams, piers, airports, farms, schools, bridges, hospitals, etc.
Moreover, 80 percent of projects went to pockets of workers, 18 percent on equipment and materials, and a meager 2 percent on administration, a far cry from the 20 percent administrative costs of local bureaucracies, not to mention corruption that can go 30 percent to 40 percent or more just like in ghost projects.
The true test of good governance is when the government can provide jobs and cheap food for its people because this truly wipes out poverty.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com