BY ADRIAN P. NEMES III
A meeting will be held Thursday next week by the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board to finally resolve the issue of the workers’ minimum salaries in Western Visayas, labor representative Wennie Sancho said yesterday.
Sancho said this was agreed on during a virtual conference with assistant director Jesus Elpidio Atal of the Department of Labor and Employment last week.
Sancho said it seems that a wage adjustment may be granted, based on the executive summary of the consultations conducted by the Board in various areas in the region.
He said the pandemic made it difficult to advance the struggle for wage increase, or any form of amelioration at the moment, adding that, it is better to decide immediately in order not to prolong the agony of the workers.
PRESERVATION
Due to massive unemployment caused by the closure of business establishments, Sancho said job preservation rather than increase in wages became the rallying point of the management sector in opposing a wage hike.
But he stressed that the “wage hike freeze” scheme will just wreck havoc on the economic lives of the workers, who are already suffering from the erosion of their purchasing power, and diminution in wages and other benefits.
A regional economic profile released by the Philippine Statistics Authority recently showed that the nominal daily wage of a worker is supposedly P395 per day, but is only actually receiving P301.26 daily because the purchasing power of the peso has decreased.
The peso purchasing power stood at 76 centavos, based on the consumer price index as of July 2021.
Sancho said it means that a worker is losing P93.74 per day, or P2,437 in 26 working days, and that the lost purchasing power of P93.74 daily cannot be restored without a wage adjustment.*
