Yesterday and today
When I was still in shorts and was in the primary school, I was given on school days five centavos as my baon. Ten centavos were for the kids of well-off families. If ten centavos was given to me, that I can consider luxurious spending like having a special halo halo and a mamon to go along. And that five centavos was fair enough, I can already have one boiled sweet potato and a hopiang mungo and a clean drink from the water pump in the school garden.
The daily wage was four pesos for ordinary workers. And with that four pesos, basic needs of a family of five or sometimes seven or eight can be met. Only rich families owned televisions. And only they can afford cars and motorbikes. Only they can travel abroad. And traveling abroad in those years was big deal. Ordinary folks go to pintakasi on Sundays and the kids will be happy going to a movie even only once a month. Others only ‘once in a blue moon’.
The orchestra ticket for kids on movie houses in Angeles City was fifteen centavos and twenty five for adults. I never bothered in my youth how much the balcony ticket was priced. In the San Nicolas public market in Angeles, you can have a plateful of pancit luglog for ten centavos. Halo halo the same amount. There was a centimeter height limit for kids and were not collected fares on buses. The Angeles-Manila round trip ticket was eighty five centavos. There was no air conditioning among buses then. Two of the popular bus lines were La Mallorca Pambusco of the Enriquez family of Macabebe and San Fernando. Its main competitor on the road was the Philippine Rabbit Bus Lines of the Paras and Buan families of Tarlac. Fare was a lot cheaper when taking the government owned Philippine National Railway train that run from Damortis, La Union to Tutuban in Divisoria in Manila. It makes stops in Angeles, San Fernando and Malolos in Bulacan.
I paid one hundred five pesos as matriculation fee for one whole semester when I entered first year at College of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Sto. Tomas. My friend Bert Guiao who took up a commerce degree paid seven pesos for first semester. At forty pesos a month there was already board and lodging on a well appointed apartment around the socalled university belt in Manila. Me and five other friends stayed on what they called bed space room which was priced at fifty pesos per month. And the six of us shared less than ten pesos for the rent.
Fast forward. Labor groups are pressing its call for a P320 acrossthe-board wage increase and ‘pointing out that (common) workers have long been treated as whipping boys and deserve to live in decency. Today’s minimum in Metro Manila is P512 and around P400 in provinces. The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) and the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) chided presidential spokesman Harry Roque to go to the market and buy household supplies with his P512.
‘What can you buy at the present salary? You can only buy noodles, sardines. Even dried fish has become expensive, according to officials of the labor groups. But government, particularly majority of those in the House of Representatives are showing inflexibility in enacting a a law on wages. The workers in each region are fed up with the wage board decisions which in most cases can’t satisfy the hue and cry of the workforce. Many believe that employers warning of mass layoffs is more than illusory. The continuing high prices of basic commodities continue to rise but government is exhibiting an attitude that it can still absorb criticisms because the country has a popular president.