In the wake of the 19^th Congress’ adjournment without passing a proposed legislation for a significant wage increase for Filipino workers, the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) condemns the Senate, the House of Representatives and ultimately President Ferdinand Marcos Jr for their disregard for the sorry plight of the country’s laborers.

Filipino workers urgently and badly need a significant wage increase. If our legislators truly cared for the country’s laborers, they could have agreed to legislate a P100 wage increase now and promise to legislate another significant increase soon. Instead, they staged this silly charade of being bogged down by the competing versions of the Senate and the Lower House and left the country’s workers empty-handed.

We of course prefer the P200 wage increase being proposed by the HOR over the P100 wage increase being proposed by the Senate. There is also the proposed P1,200 national minimum wage, equal to the family living wage, that our legislators should have considered. At the same time, this is the closest the country’s legislature has come to approving a legislated wage hike since 1989, but it squandered the chance.

We blame no less than Marcos Jr for the wage hike bill’s non-passage. The outcome speaks for itself: Marcos Jr did not use his immense power and influence to rally the legislature to approve a substantial wage hike that is much needed by Filipino workers. It is very likely that he directed and orchestrated this charade to feign concern for workers while doing nothing to alleviate their plight.

Marcos Jr gave in to the demands of big foreign and local capitalists which opposed the legislative measure. He is upholding the interest of profit to the detriment of workers’ rights. He has not carried out any major improvement in workers’ rights in the area of wages, security of tenure, and unionization.

Despite his predecessor’s record of providing the smallest increase in the minimum wage in recent years, and despite the severe cost of living crisis battering workers, Marcos Jr refuses to increase wages significantly. In contrast to his predecessor who made a spectacle out of his promise of ending contractualization, Marcos Jr is deafeningly silent on the issue.

In the wake of Duterte’s severe violations of workers’ rights – 72 victims of extrajudicial killings, 23 political prisoners at present, numerous cases of redtagging and harassment – Marcos Jr has not carried out any initiative to seek accountability. In his Independence Day speech, he called on Filipinos to exercise their rights, forgetting that the Philippine State, which he now leads, is the primary duty-bearer in ensuring those rights.

Demands for a significant wage hike will not end with the adjournment of the 19^th Congress. For one, in March, the number of Filipino families who claimed experiencing involuntary hunger reached 27.2 percent or 7.5 million households, the highest since the 30.7 percent registered at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.