Pinoys work harder but pay not getting better, says institute

MANILA, Philippines — Filipinos are working harder but their pay is not getting better, a Church-based group lamented that Filipinos are working harder but still not getting better. The Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research, Inc. (Eiler) disclosed this in a statement on the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines website (www.cbcpnews.com). It said most Filipinos are overworked because they need to do multiple jobs to be able to sustain their daily needs like food, clothing, shelter, allowances for their children and fare for them to go to work. "Based on the 2007 statistics of the Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics (BLES) saying that 81 percent of the multiple job orders were permanently employed, while 41 percent were self-employed in their primary occupation," said Eiler programs officer Anna Leah Escresa. She said this is equivalent to 3.1 million multiple jobholders, across all industries where about 2.5 million of these were permanently employed. An estimated 16 percent or 480,000 were in short-term, seasonal or casual employment, she said. Among working women, especially in the garment sector, most of them were forced to take on home-based subcontracting jobs after their regular work (usually 18 hours per day) from the same factory where they were employed, just to make ends meet, she said. "These multiple jobs are taking their toll on the health of the workers," she said. Also, she said multiple jobholders among skilled and unskilled workers total some 902,000 and about 41.9% of these are women, the biggest proportion of women with multiple jobs compared to other sectors. What is saddening, she said, is that women workers are even worse off than their male counterparts because of the huge gap between real wages and family living wages. In Metro Manila alone, the real value of the minimum wage is at P240.86 as of July 2008, while P911 per day is needed for a family of six in August 2008 according to National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC). Furthermore, despite the recent easing of oil prices, inflation is expected to average between 9% and 11 percent this year, a sharp climb from 2.8 percent in 2007 according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Last August, inflation rate climbed to 12.5 percent, the highest in 17 years. Eiler Inc. said government should immediately heed the workers call for substantial wage hikes that the sector direly needs to cope up with rising prices. The group is a non-governmental development organization providing institutional support for labor research, education and workers organizing nationwide. - GMANews.TV