2024 in Review: Workers Caught Between Economic Difficulties and Political Intramurals

In 2024, workers faced severe challenges in their wages, benefits and working conditions as they were caught in the vise of economic difficulties brought about by the cost-of-living crisis and escalating intramurals between the two leading political dynasties in the country.

While the average inflation of 3.2% in 2024 was almost half compared to 2023, it continued to erode the purchasing power of wages. Relatively higher price increases in food and utilities also disproportionately hit the bottom rungs of the income deciles, meaning the formal and informal workers. Thus, the demand for another round of minimum wage increases in 2024 was a recurring theme for organized labor. The campaign for a wage hike was two-pronged with wage bills for a P150 increase filed at Congress and at the wage boards.

The Senate approved a P100 increase in the minimum wage in February 2024. This advance was a result of organized labor successfully leveraging the rift between the upper and lower house of Congress over the latest move to amend the Constitution. The Senate stood pat against charter change and instead pushed for the wage bill’s passage. However, the reverse was the case in the House of Representatives. Despite conducting hearings on the P150 wage hike bill, the House Labor Committee sat on the proposal and basically killed it. In contrast with this inaction on the workers’ demand for a wage hike, the House was fast and furious with the quadcomm hearings on the drug war and extra-judicial killings during former President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration and the investigation on the controversial budget of the Office of Vice President Sara Duterte and the Department of Education during her tenure.

The year ended with no legislated wage hike but with wage orders for several regions. Notwithstanding the wage orders, minimum wages in all the regions—including those which increased, like Western Visayas, Metro Manila, Calabarzon, Cebu and Central Luzon—remained below the official poverty line. Even though the threshold was assailed for being too low—as the controversy over the P64 daily food budget revealed. With the wage boards perpetuating a system of poverty wages, calls for the abolition of provincial rates became popular.

On another front, organized labor and civil society allies fought a defensive war to keep Philhealth funds devoted to improving benefits services to members and providing services for indigents as mandated by the Universal Health Care Act. P60 billion of Philhealth’s funds were transferred by President Bong Bong Marcos Jr. to fund unprogrammed items in the national budget before the Supreme Court stopped in October the last tranche of P29.9 billion.

Another battle erupted in December when the Congressional bicameral conference committee removed the subsidy for PhilHealth along with cuts in other social services. The labor coalition Nagkaisa led protests in Metro Manila and Cebu—including a big rally in Mendiola—to call for the restoration of the Philhealth subsidy and social services budget. But President Marcos Jr. did not heed the popular clamor as he signed the national budget by year end with the much-assailed budget insertions for ayuda kept intact. Among these was the P26 billion unprogrammed budget for AKAP which has been criticized as funding for electoral patronage. As if on cue, the COMELEC allowed the distribution of ayuda even during the midterm elections this year—breaking with long-established rule of prohibiting the use of public money for vote buying. This means that formal and informal workers will now have to beg trapos for assistance for medical and other emergencies instead of getting health insurance as a right.

Even as demands for higher pay, lower prices, more jobs and decent work remain very popular issues during the election period, prospects are bleak that the polls will result in positive outcomes for workers given that political dynasties—which are evolving from fat to obese—dominate the landscape. Workers have no allies either in the two main political dynasties—the House of Polvoron and the House of Fentanyl—which will be fighting for supremacy in May 2025.

Workers will have to endure worse economic difficulties as political infighting heightens in 2025 and the remaining years of the Marcos, Jr. administration. Nonetheless, this situation also motivates organized labor to engage with public outrage over wanton government corruption and dynastic political dominance. A big multi-sectoral rally this month promises to jumpstart a robust movement for good governance, in which workers’ demands should be embedded and integral. (Partido Manggagawa)