Arroyo paints herself a workers’ champ

Trumpets ‘achievements’ for the sector in final Labor Day speech

Painting herself as a champion of laborers while trying to appease the workers’ displeasure over her administration’s anti-labor policies, President Arroyo, in her last Labor Day speech yesterday, enumerated to various labor groups and workers in attendance at the event her “achievements” for the benefit of the labor sector during her nine-and-a-half years incumbency r.

At the same occasion, Arroyo also ordered Labor and Employment Secretary Marianito Roque and the regional wage boards across the country to hasten their decisions on the workers’ appeals for an increase in the minimum wage. This drew cheers from the crowd that filled the SMX Convention Center of the SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City.

“I would also like to remind you (workers) that the value our minimum wage for the workers is still favorable compared to other countries in the (Southeast Asian) region. The monthly wage here is at P148 to US$256, which is higher compared to the minimum wage in Vietnam, China, Indonesia and Thailand – to think that these countries are richer than ours,” she said in Filipino in her speech.

Arroyo further boasted that her administration’s reform programs have spared the country from the debilitating effects of the global financial crisis and the food crisis before that and “could very well stand the challenges ahead.”

She noted that during last year’s global financial crisis, the cooperation of the labor sector helped the government succeed in its emergency employment initiatives, such as the Comprehensive Livelihood Emergency Employment Program (CLEEP), the Out of School Youth Serving Towards Economic Resiliency (Oyster), Nurses Assigned in the Rural Sector (Nars) and the Youth Information Technology Opportunities (Youth-Ito), among others.

At the event, labor union leaders presented to Arroyo an “agenda” that also contained their expression of dismay over the slowness of the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC) in responding to workers’ complaints against their unjust employers.

In response to this concern, she said she was told by Roque that the Labor department has already appointed 46 more labor arbiters to address all such cases filed at the NLRC.

Arroyo also gave highlight to a purported dramatic decrease in the number of labor strikes in the country under her administration vis-a-vis the previous administrations.

“I would like to thank you (workers) for your very important contribution in sustaining, for the long period of time, the industrial peace. Thank you, for most of you agree that the only way to arrive at faster, proper, and better solutions to misunderstandings is through peaceful settlement and not through strikes,” she said.

Other so-called accomplishments touted by Arroyo at the Labor Day convention include the enactment of the following bills: the SSS Condonation Act, the Migrant Workers Act, the Magna Carta for Women, the Anti-Human Trafficking Act and the Tax Relief Package of 2008.

She also cited her administration’s “timely” setting in place of the Expat Livelihood Assistance program, which was implemented during the recession that struck the whole world last year and affected Filipinos working both locally and abroad. –Aytch S. de la Cruz, Daily Tribune