Hundreds of thousands of Filipino workers marched on May 1, 2025 to press for the immediate approval of the P1,200 family living wage, which is barely enough to sustain the daily needs of a family of five, based on studies conducted by IBON Foundation, and the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) urged all candidates to support the demand.
Chief economic planner Arsenio Balisacan apparently has the same genes as his predecessors, one of whom triumphantly declared that the Philippines was on the “precipice” of becoming middle-income country even as it was grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic and successive disasters. The good bureaucrat forgot that a “precipice” is hardly an inch out of cliff.
The Institute for Economic Rights noted that every year, more people are killed at work than in wars. Most don’t die of mystery ailments, or in tragic “accidents.” They die because an employer decided their safety just wasn’t that important a priority.
To be honest, Sara never accomplished anything significant since June 30, 2022, aside from flying to Germany to watch a Taylor Swift concert while Metro Manila was being flooded and hundreds of thousands were being evacuated.
Just like the grossly underqualified Bong Go, Bato should be kicked out by millions of voters who have wakened from slumber and recovered their suspended rationality.
Their keyboard warriors engaged in mutually-destructive disinformation campaigns (many of them from the Duterte camp also moonlighting to be China’s fifth column in the Philippines) and their footmen in the broadsheets and the tabloids promoting the candidacies of such clowns as Bong Go and Bato de la Rosa.
“Kapag itinuloy ang proyekto, mawawalan ng kabuhayan ang libu-libong pamilya. Hindi lang ito usapin ng energy generation—ito ay malinaw na banta sa kabuhayan at karapatan ng mga mangingisda,” Ramos argued.
Thousands of Filipino workers are conducting noise barrages to push for the enactment of a P1,200 family wage nationwide after more than 30 organizations representing workers from the private, public, agriculture, electronics, telecommunications, manufacturing, education, health, business process outsourcing (BPO), informal and migrant sectors pledged to pursue the campaign.
This P20 per kilo rice is so dirt cheap that industry players suspect government must have ordered all NFA warehouses to strip themselves of their inventory, ship them to the Visayas and sell them to consumers, with each buyer limited to only 10 kilos
Statistics indicate that landlordism is back with a vengeance, with a mere 0.9% of the landowners now controlling 30% of all farms, with only 155 landlords “owning” more than 40,000 hectares and 163,000 peasant families are left with crumbs of less than a hectare each, a parcel of land that can hardly be viable even if you practice what has been dubbed as “vertical agriculture.”
