Not P125 maybe, but minimum wage adjustment a must

As expected, the P125 minimum wage adjustment the labor sector invariably asks each year once again went pfft this year on Labor Day, a day which President Aquino now calls “Good Job Day” (“P-Noy bats for ‘Good Job Day’,” Inquirer, 5/1/13). Whosoever’s job has turned out remarkably “good” this year, no one knows.  I assume the President congratulates his own administration for having achieved for the country a 6-percent-plus GDP growth this year, indeed surpassing all other regions in these days of global recession.  That, even as the National Statistical Coordination Board, which Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan heads, said that such a feat had hardly brought down the nation’s alarming poverty and unemployment rates.

The President may have not been totally deaf to labor’s unchanging concerns, yet his May 1 pronouncements left much to be desired.

To better implement the labor laws against contractualization, he is hiring new labor-law compliance lawyers. But why only now, when job contracting has been denounced as illegal for many generations?  To address the extrajudicial killings of labor leaders, he ordered Justice Secretary Leila de Lima to investigate and prosecute such cases. (With due respect, what may we expect from a justice minister who up to now has nothing positive to report on the continuing disappearances of Jonas Burgos and Jovito Palparan, much less on the the progress of the Ampatuan massacre?) The President said he could not certify as urgent the Security of Tenure bill because it does not involve any emergency or national calamity—alas, as if such an emergency or calamity did exist when he certified the urgency of the Reproductive Health bill.

In fairness, he had a good point in not increasing the tax exemption threshold of the 13th-month pay from P30,000 to P60,000.  It will not only entail a huge loss in government revenues; it will essentially benefit not so much the low-earning as the high-earning sector of the working populace.

But increase the minimum wage law the President must!  Not really by as much as the P125 that labor yearly asks; at least enough to give justice to what, methinks, has been the government’s very own thesis—whether it realizes it or not—in exempting minimum wage earners from income tax.

As things are, a married employee with four dependents is exempt from income tax if his gross income is less than his maximum allowable deduction of P150,000 under the tax code, i.e. P50,000 for himself and P25,000 per child not exceeding four.  This theoretically means the State realizes he needs at least P150,000 per year to keep his family’s body and soul together. That amount divided by 312 (the regular working days per year under the existing six-day workweek)—equals P481 per day, as against the current minimum wage of P456 (in the National Capital Region alone; it’s much lower in other regions).  It is high time the President learned to realize this plain truth, lest he continue to be under the vise-like grip of the Employers’ Confederation of the Philippines.

—RUDY L. CORONEL,

rudycoronel2004@yahoo.com