Gone to begging everyone
YOUNG men forced to manhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s because of the mass protests, mostly knew the songs of Pete Seeger if not the life story of Seeger himself. While the children of the Filipino elite do everything to enter Harvard and strive to become masters of the universe, Seeger did the opposite. Coming from a long line of New York Brahmins, he attended Harvard only to drop out after a couple of years, to sing and write songs against war and injustice. One of his iconic antiwar songs was “Where have all the flowers gone.” At the peak of the civil rights movement in the US, he was also credited for changing “We will overcome” to “We shall overcome,” the movement’s anthem.
In the Philippine context, you change “flowers” with “workers” and you will be asking what probably is the most relevant question in this particular place and time. Where have all the workers gone, the same workers on whose tired backs economies are built? The tragedy is no one is asking this critical question. And the State, the official State, seems to evade/elide the ever- important question of what ever happened to the Filipino workingman. From time to time, the Department of Labor and Employment tiptoes issues dismal unemployment data but skips the grim broad picture to hoodwink Filipinos on the prostrate state of the working class.
Of course, even as the Labor department tiptoes around the prostrate state of the Filipino worker, part of the answer can be provided by the naked eye.
Past the Chancellor’s House at University of the Philippines Diliman, along a bend of C. P. Garcia Avenue where motorists and bike riders must slow down, you will see desperate men with improvised begging bowls and improvised signs. They are former jeepney drivers dislocated by the coronavirus pandemic. The jeepneys, the backbone of short- and medium- distance rides in the metro and rural areas, have been cast aside under the flimsy cover of “modernization,” with their routes mangled under the so-called new GCQ — general community quarantine — operating guidelines. These proud drivers, “driver, sweet lover,” remember, have been reduced to begging to survive, these “kings of the road” for many generations forced to take the low road of asking for alms. You read their appeal, “jeepney drivers,” and you can read between the signs the state of dehumanization they are in. Not for lack of will to ply the roads to make a living but because transport bureaucrats have decided that jeepneys are obsolete and are now a public nuisance. Never mind the human lives, the proud human lives, that have been sacrificed in the process.
The begging is not limited to a stretch of C.P. Garcia Avenue. Go to some street corner in Camanava, the innards of Tondo, the congested alleyways of Pasay City and you will see men in their prime reduced to — and dehumanized by — begging.
Where have all the drivers gone? Gone to begging everyone.
The stories of bus drivers are more depressing — stories of laid-off bus drivers going amok, stories of domestic abuse done by drivers due to desperation and idleness, stories of bus drivers taking in poison to end, once and for all, their diminished lives.
If you think the pilots, the drivers in the sky, are better off, take the cue from the
article on the universal fate of pilots. A few months before the pandemic, there was a global shortage of trained pilots. Now, more than 50 percent of them are out of jobs. Second and third officers have either been laid off for good or furloughed. In the Philippine context, airplanes do occasional international cargo runs, then pick up jobless overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), or their corpses, on the return trip to the country.
Venture outside Labor Secretary Silvestro Bello 3rd’s truth-averse, fact- sanitized universe and you will find out the real score. The reported 17.7-percent unemployment rate, itself a piece of disastrous data, may no longer apply. Labor economists and forecasters are looking at 10 to 12 million workers to be dislocated by the pandemic, a historic rate of joblessness never seen in close to 35 years. Whether some answers to the employment wasteland will be provided for in the coming weeks, we do not know. Two important sectors, small farmers and workers, have been invisible to the Duterte government. The small farmers and the workers have never really figured in the national conversation.
What would be the labor participation rate after two months or so? Right now, only 55 percent of adult Filipinos are either in the workforce or are actively looking for work. The rest have disappeared. This is a scary part of the labor data, although no one is pointing this out.
Recently, Representatives Rodante Marcoleta, Michael Defensor, Jesus Crispin Remulla et al. led the charge brigade that sent 11,000-plus workers of the country’s biggest TV network into the ranks of the unemployed. Mr. Harry Roque Jr., in a move akin to kicking the dead, said they can queue for
Before the pandemic, any major drop in the number of Filipinos domestically employed was cushioned by the reliable overseas employment sector. Now, around 700,000 OFWs are estimated to be dislocated by the pandemic from the various work diasporas.
If some of the returning OFWs, faced with lack of domestic job prospects resort to begging, just like what many of the domestically dislocated have been doing, that would not be surprising.