First of two parts
The Covid-19 pandemic has made the huge informal economy visible.
The two-and-a-half month lockdown knocked down the jobs and livelihoods of millions of informals—the street vendors, solo micro entrepreneurs, home-based workers, transport workers, construction workers unaffiliated with the big developers, migrant workers, small coastal fisherfolks, landless rural poor, camote miners, waste pickers, on-call service workers (repairs, care giving, etc.), domestic service workers, bit players in the entertainment industry, tourist aides, etc. The informals constitute at least two-thirds of the labor force. They and their families form the bulk of the congested urban poor communities, peri-urban poor communities, rural poor communities, coastal poor communities and upland poor communities.
The numerous social, economic and cultural links, relationships and activities that the informal workers and their families pursue together at the community level make up an economy that is somehow distinct from the formal economy of the better-off members of Philippine society. The formal economy is composed of the Social Security System/Government Service Insurance System/Bureau of Internal Revenue-listed wage workers in the public and private sectors, the licensed professionals, the incorporators and officers of Securities and Exchange Commission/Philippine Economic Zone Authority/Board of Investments-registered firms big and small, the officers and members of the government bureaucracy and military, the Department of Trade and Industry-Local Government Units (LGU)-registered small businesses, the academicians, and so on and so forth. To complete the overall picture of the labor market, one may add the 10 million or so overseas Filipino workers as the third sector of the labor market.
When the distribution of the cash assistance under the social amelioration program for the poor came, the government was flooded with complaints on the exclusion of numerous informal workers and their families. What the Department of Social Welfare and Development has is the list of around 4 million beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer. As of mid-May, government only had limited success in SAP distribution, reaching over 10 million families versus the 18 million target of the Bayanihan to Heal as One program. This is so because of the DSWD’s reliance on the CCT list and “mean testing” measures based on the 2015 data of the Philippine Statistics Authority. A number of mayors, exasperated over the incomplete list of the poor by the DSWD, voiced out what they know on the ground: the actual number of the deserving poor is about twice of the DSWD list.
In particular, the migrant workers circulating within Metro Manila such as the construction workers coming from far-flung provinces are usually not registered in the barangays where they are temporarily staying. Residents of informally-built homes in different nooks and crannies of the urban/peri-urban poor communities are also not active in barangay affairs. And so are the families allowed by the original barangay-listed families to build “extensions” or rent a room or two as domicile for these families that are not barangay-listed.
But today, the informals have become more visible. The mass media, from week one of the lockdown, have been focusing public attention on the plight of so many informals who have failed to receive government assistance simply because they are “not in the list.”
It is, therefore, heartening to see that Congress is moving to make the informals more visible and is trying to address the socioeconomic development challenges posed by the informal sector/informal economy. House Labor Committee Chairman Enrico Pineda convened a virtual House hearing on the Magna Carta for Workers in the Informal Economy (MCWIE) based on the bills filed by Representatives Evelina Escudero, Michael Edgar Aglipay, Dan Fernandez, Lawrence Fortun, Luis Raymund Villafuerte, Raymond Democrito Mendoza and Alfred Vargas.
The MCWIE idea is not new. It was originally hatched by the home-based workers affiliated with Homenet Philippines, which, in turn, forged a broader Magna Carta for the Informal Sector Alliance (MAGCAISA) involving trade unions, academe and civil society organizations espousing the interests of informal workers, from the “endo” workers in the formal sector to the informal construction workers, from the landless rural poor to the ambulant street vendors, and so on.
In the 13th and 14th Congresses, MAGCAISA got the active support of Representatives Dan Fernandez, Sonny Angara, Sonny Escudero and Erin Tanada, and in the Senate, the late Sen. Miriam Defensor. Hopefully, with the Covid-19 threat unresolved, Congress and Malacañang will be able to summon the political will to pass this urgent and critical social legislation.
Dan Fernandez, in his sponsorship speech explained the rationale:
“…the numbers of workers in the informal economy in the country is HUGE—the April, 2018 data indicate that there are around 25.7 million workers. They comprise almost 63 percent of all economically active Filipinos. The women workers in the informal economy are 56.4 percent of all economically active women.
“They are among the poorest of the poor workers YET in the same year, they contributed around P5.7 trillion, or 33 percent of our country’s gross domestic product [GDP]…. Indeed, they are poor but they are productive.
“Sadly, these workers are not protected by our labor laws. They are without benefits and social protection enjoyed by those formally employed. There are no labor standards that protect their rights, health, safety, and well-being while working. Our labor laws favor workers in formal employment setting, and mostly ignore those in the informal economy.
“There is little government attention in terms of addressing their needs, honing their skills, and supporting their enterprises and livelihood activities.”
Fernandez argued that had the MCWIE bill been enacted into law, the big problems on SAP distribution—specifically, identification of beneficiaries and quick delivery of assistance to the needy (to prevent hunger and anger)—would have been avoided or minimized. MCWIE has provisions on the development of a database of all informal workers, from the LGU level up to the national level. This means the LGUs themselves need to institute a system of cheap but friendly system of registering the informals. The LGUs shall have also a system of recognizing the organizations of the informals as development partners.
However, the overall goal of MCWIE is indeed developmental, that is, to help the informals “transition” to a higher level of development through government-informal sector partnership on skilling, enterprise development, technology and capital acquisition. The International Labor Organization call this process “transitioning,” that is, helping the informals become formal players in the labor market and the economy. But to Homenet and MAGCAISA, it is a process that leads not only to the general upgrading of the informal economy but also to the empowerment of the informals as citizen-producers, that is, as citizen-producers who have basic rights such as the right to form their own organizations as provided in the Constitution (Section 3, Article XIII). By recognizing the rights of the informals, the government is able to develop a stronger platform for whole-of-society approach in addressing the myriad challenges of economic and human development in Covid times.
To be concluded