By Junex Doronio
MANILA — Stressing that since 1989, the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Boards (RTWPBs) have failed to keep pace with significant changes in the cost of living, the Cebu-based Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) on Saturday (24 Feb 2024) called on the House of Representatives to immediately pass House Bill 7871, or the Wage Recovery Act of 2023, authored by TUCP president and House Deputy Speaker Raymond Democrito Mendoza.
HB 7871 seeks to legislate an across-the-board wage increase of P150 in the daily wages of private sector workers nationwide.
“We laud the marching orders of Speaker Ferdinand Martin G. Romualdez for the House Committee on Labor and Employment to urgently and vigorously conduct public hearings as soon as possible to hear all sectors and deliberate on the much-needed increase in the take-home pay of our workers,” Mendoza said in a statement.
The TUCP noted that since 1989, the RTWPBs have failed to keep pace with significant changes in the cost of living due to an “unsaid, unspoken de facto implicit policy of dampening legitimate wage demands by setting too late, too little, and highly unjust wages.”
“As Filipino workers struggle with already low wages eroded by inflation and various headwinds, the legislated wage hike is no longer a social or economic imperative but a moral and existential imperative, especially for our millions of mostly poor wage earners. Their honest hard work receives only poverty wages that cannot even sustain the health, productivity, and need for a decent life of their families,” Mendoza hammered on.
(el Amigo/MNM)