PRESIDENTIAL aspirant and labor leader Leodegario “Ka Leody” de Guzman talked about his socioeconomic reform advocacies, focusing on the labor market, agriculture and taxation.
During the recent Pandesal Forum held at the Kamuning Bakery Café in Quezon City, he said that together with his running mate, vice presidential candidate Dr. Walden Bello, they are running “not only for change of faces and personalities in politics, but to advocate systemic reforms.”
Among the proposals for change of the presidential bet of Partido Lakas ng Masa and chairman of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino is reducing working hours for workers and employees from eight hours to six hours daily, but maintaining same benefits and wages so that millions of additional new jobs can be created.
De Guzman plans to impose a one-time 20-percent wealth tax on the country’s top 500 families to finance his P1-trillion Philippine economic recovery plan. It will consist of P475 billion for his public jobs generation program, P400 billion for health stimulus and P125 billion assistance for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
If elected president, he will double the budget for agriculture subsidies and support for farmers and fishermen; push for progressive taxation of taxing more the rich and lessening taxes regressive taxation on ordinary workers like the value- added tax or VAT; nationalize basic and strategic public utilities like water and power services to prioritize “people over profits.”
His “Labor First Policy” aims to allay the worries of MSMEs. It includes instituting a P750 national minimum wage and the abolition of all forms of contractualization.
“What we are fighting for is ‘labor first’ not ‘labor only’. The next-in-line beneficiary of substantial wage hikes and regularization will be the MSME sector because Filipino will have more purchasing power to buy from local businesses. The demand for their goods and services will correspondingly increase. To counter the tendency to increase prices with higher demand, the other pressing concerns of small business have to be addressed through government intervention, regulation, and control to power rates and fuel prices,” the presidential hopeful explained in both Filipino and English.
Ka Leody also wants to institute a People’s Sovereign Wealth Fund to bankroll local industrialization via aggressively investing in MSME’s where importation is highest.
He intends to initially finance this with $50 billion from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ Gross International Reserves, which has already reached $107.9 billion as of October 2021 as driven by a decade’s worth of remittance inflow from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).
“Let us view the country’s Gross International Reserves as a fund for our workers, after all, it was pooled from the collective sweat and blood of OFWs. Utilize the fund to create opportunities for decent lives and decent jobs, which forces our fellow Filipinos to seek for them abroad. Let us invest in ‘working class enterprises’, rather than use our dollar reserves to protect the foreign exchange rates and the interests of big importers,” stressed the independent candidate. 30