There’s a raging debate now about the recent passage by Congress of a 125-peso across-the-board salary increase. On the one hand, workers and unionists insist that this increase, such as it is, is long overdue. On the other hand, businesses have denounced the increase as not only a product of political posturing by congressmen (to curry favor from the public in this year’s election) but also harmful to the economy in the long run.
We revisit some of our stories on this issue.
Poverty, hunger, violent demolitions, and lack of social services and basic utilities continue to plague the urban poor. And things are getting worse. In fact, the Philippines was adjudged by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Eviction (COHRE) as one of three recipients, together with Nigeria and Greece, of the Housing Rights Violator Award ?for their systematic violation of housing rights and continued failure to abide by their international legal obligations.?
This year, more and more urban-poor dwellers in Davao City cannot be expected to build their own homes, as City Hall and the national government are hard put to raise funds for their housing programs. A more disturbing aspect of the problem, however, is that even if houses were made available to poor Filipinos, they don?t have enough income to pay for these. In the meantime, the demolition of houses in slum areas continues, displacing hundreds of families.
Administration propaganda one-sidedly presents growth, peso appreciation, lower public deficits and foreign investments as if these were development ends in themselves. But the deteriorating social conditions of joblessness, hunger and poverty are the sharpest rebuttal of any government economic hype.
(First of two parts) Deployment of overseas Filipino workers abroad, even in danger zones, has been the response of the government to the ballooning unemployment rate and worsening poverty situation.…