For example, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo claimed that her administration was able to create one million jobs in 2006. What she did not say was that she failed to meet her target of generating one million jobs in each of the previous five years.
Secondly, the national government did not actually provide workers with benefits, considering that the money that will be spent will come from contributions, deposits and earnings of members of the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), the Pag-Ibig Fund and the Social Security System. The fact remains that the workers will have to pay back their loans even as they already have very limited income to cover their families' basic needs.
What Ms Arroyo deliberately chose not to mention was that the non-wage benefits will be useless to a large number of Filipinos simply because they do not have jobs in the first place; that 30 percent of the public sector employees will not benefit from GSIS loans because they will be laid off under the government's so-called rationalization program; that the jobs created in the past three years were mere replacements of vacated posts and not really new ones; that most of the jobs available are good for four to five months only, without security of tenure, and in less than six months down the road, the contractual workers will be back in the streets or attending more job fairs, again looking for work.
The non-wage benefits will only drive more contractual workers, who have no real assurance of getting new jobs, to go after loans.
It would be interesting to note that the announcement comes after the Department of Budget and Management and the administration-dominated House of Representatives' ways and means committee blocked the passage of a bill that would have given minimum wage earners tax exemptions. Filed immediately after the imposition of the expanded value-added tax, the bill sought to increase the amount of non-taxable income to P50,000 annually, with corollary increases in tax exemptions for every wage bracket. The bill was approved on third and final reading last year and a similar measure was approved by the Senate. However, the House ways and means committee refused to hold a bicameral conference to enact the bill.
The public has to know the real score behind these "non-wage benefits." These are not gifts from the administration but measures that the workers will still have to work for before they get to enjoy them.
DANNY L. EDRALIN, chair, Alliance of Progressive Labor
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this article appeared on inquirer.net http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/letterstotheeditor/view_article.php?article_id=65901
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