False promises

There is no doubt that the goal of every employee is to be given better wages. Wages, to a large extent, define the quality of life of each person. The government, with a mandate to look after what is best for the people, would naturally seek to promote better wages for its citizens. Businesses, on the other hand, to the point that it is able, would like to do the same. A hungry and sickly citizenry is bad for business.

But wages are defined by reason. They have to be rational, to the point of not being oppressive. So when some militant groups proposed a national minimum wage, the immediate reaction of business was to reject promptly the proposal. And it is easy to see why, even from the standpoint of an employee. Having a national minimum wage rate is simply unrealistic and impractical.

I have recently gone around several very provincial and rural areas and I cannot help but be reminded of them when I heard about this crazy proposal by militant groups. These groups apparently love the sound of their own voices but hate taking the effort to validate what they espouse. Had they taken the slightest initiative to go around, they would have discovered the folly of their ideas.

A national minimum wage rate that is sufficient for the needs of say, a Metro Manila worker, will be an astronomically impossible amount to pay for an employer in, say, Matalom, Leyte. The geographical and regional situation in the Philippines simply makes any imposition of a uniform national minimum wage rate impossible.

This is not to say that workers in the far-flung provinces will not be jumping up and down with joy if such an eventuality happened. And the truth of the matter is, I myself would wish it did happen. But it is one thing to wish for the impossible and another to just take what is possible. In the scheme of things, success often awaits those who aim high but not lose sight of what is achievable.

What can be done under the situation --the common rant is about inflation-- is perhaps to grant some adjustment to those living in the provinces for whom inflation makes no distinction. Such an adjustment might be a bit bigger than what might be given those in the urban centers. But to make everything uniform nationwide is, as business correctly puts it, impossible.

What makes the situation even more difficult is that it is this crazy proposal by the militants that get more extensive airing in media, making it appear that that is the direction where everything ought to be headed. As a result, the noise only serves to give false hopes to those expecting life can be a little bit better than how it is in these inflationary times.

Worse, the false prophets get praised and idolized for taking up the cudgels of the lowly inflation-rapped workers, who obviously know no better and are just being played by these politicians of a different kind. The militants criticize everything and promise anything, yet achieve nothing really substantial to mean something.

‘Having a national minimum wage rate is simply unrealistic and impractical.’