Forgotten and forsaken

Many labor union leaders, legislators, opinion makers and sympathizers are in willful ignorance as they pour their hearts out against the recent wage order, NCR 25 of June 2024, raising the minimum wage by P35 per day which they criticized as an insult and a disgrace.

Traditionally, NCR wage orders trigger sequential wage orders for all regions.

Completely ignored in the hullabaloo, noise and frenzied media coverage of the wage issue are the 17 million nameless and faceless informal workers who are very often both employers and workers themselves. They are legally invisible and never enjoy the benefits of such wage orders. Lost in the hysteria for higher wages is the virtue of SOLIDARITY and the principle of INCLUSION where the interest of all — formal and informal sector workers — is protected. Instead, the noisy protests for higher wages push further the EXCLUSION of the informal sector workers and the EXCLUSIVITY of the formal sector employees.

The informal workers are cruelly and repeatedly oppressed by the ensuing inflationary impact of every increase in minimum wage as they are pushed down to sink deeper into poverty. And nobody seems to care.

These silent workers are outside the ambit of government regulations, social services and state welfare agencies. Understandably, union leaders do not bother to organize them maybe because they are widely dispersed and difficult to gather or they are unwilling or unable to pay union dues.

These workers are below the radar of the formal economy as they fiercely struggle daily to meet their basic needs. These are the street vendors, public utility drivers, marginal producers, home-based workers, waste pickers, sari-sari store owners, barbers, manicurists, masseurs, seasonal job workers and freelancers, to mention a few.

But throughout the 21st century their services are essential, especially in developing countries as they fill the economic activities that are left untended by the formal sector enterprises and organized labor union workers.

While government and labor leaders recognize the critical role of the informal sector to society and the economy, these workers have been stigmatized as troublesome, unmanageable and pejoratively called underground, grey, black market, illegal and unethical.

Officially integrating this sector into the formal economy can be a great challenge but the benefits are incalculably beneficial to the nation. It will increase tax revenues to fund social projects and give government an opportunity to perform its duty to protect them as Filipino citizens from exploitation, abuses and marginalized existence.

In 1989, the government of President Cory Aquino took cognizance of the informal sector and passed Kalakalan 20 to fuse it into the formal sector but this failed due to several factors.

In 2002, the Barangay Micro Business Enterprise or BMBE law tried to rescue and revive the failed Kalakalan 20 but it met the same fate.

Today, the informal workers remain ignored, excluded, denounced, discriminated against and left on their own. This marginalization has condemned and further isolated them from moving out of poverty.

Many union leaders and media supporters are too preoccupied defending the formal sector employees against the alleged insulting minimum wage increase but they have not uttered a single word of concern for the FORGOTTEN and FORSAKEN 17 million informal sector workers and their 68 million family members, which is more than half of the 120 million citizens of this country, who suffer much each time the minimum wage is increased.

The informal workers are our collective concern and responsibility. Let us stop hurting them with the non-stop clamor for an unrealistic higher minimum wage, a benefit they will never receive and enjoy in their lifetime.

This article is addressed to our tripartite partners and the whole of society to temper the exclusivist, self-serving and hypocritical social concern of some misguided elements in the world of employment.