Celebrating poverty

By now just about everyone has pilloried the Department of Trade’s P500 “good enough” Noche Buena dinner as callous folly. 

But while the DTI’s rashness is a politically expensive misfire, a select cabal outside government is secretly pleased with what a very upset commentator declared is a “subsistence” dinner. On that conspiracist twist, a little later. 

Anyway, besides nostalgic cultural and gourmand paeans to the Filipino’s customary Christmas midnight dinner, the sensitive issue also handily lent itself to rabble-rousing. 

Not least of the rabble-rousers’ gusto is Ms. Imee Marcos’ hypocritical near-tears grimaces at the end of a sleekly produced, two-minute Noche Buena video wherein she deduced that Christmas had been stolen by the crooks and the corrupt who raided the public treasury.

Ms. Marcos’ B-grade flashy Christmas video would have been of passing interest if not for the fact that it was a political strategy. 

In this case, Ms. Marcos was obviously employing “agitprop,” a well-worn political tactic still serviceable in these times of unalloyed propaganda and disinformation.  

(For the curious, “agitprop” is the shortened form of agitation and propaganda techniques for influencing and mobilizing public opinion. Originating in the then Soviet Union, historical “agitprop” has been widely upgraded for the digital age through politically informed images, memes and short videos.) 

Anyway, the superficial utility of Ms. Marcos’ “agitprop” video against her estranged brother is that it is merely another embarrassing episode of a dysfunctional political family, which only means that it doesn’t reveal anything substantial about a P500 Noche Buena dinner.

A preview of that last point would be pollster Mahar Mangahas’ resonating suspicion aired last week.

“Proposing a cheap Noche Buena is intrinsically anti-labor and pro-capital. To me, the DTI’s P500 menu is only an effort to justify low wages and put it in the good graces of the business sector,” Mangahas wrote.

Mangahas’ “justify low wages” is his first devilish phrase. The second is “good graces of the business sector,” which gives clues to the conspiracist point raised above.

“Low wages,” however, is far more fruitful in relation to the P500 Noche Buena dinner than any conspiracist devilry.

This, on the unassuming point that the P500 dinner was suspiciously conditioned by the mandated minimum wage of P695 for non-agricultural workers in the National Capital Region (NCR).

The NCR’s agricultural workers, as well as those in the retail/service and small manufacturing establishments, get P658 in minimum wage. Those in other regions receive less, ranging from P435 to P550.

With those minimum wage figures, it is clear the DTI had no choice but to put on its P500 Noche Buena straitjacket. If that’s correct, the DTI didn’t calculate based on the prevailing prices of food commonly served for Noche Buena, as it vigorously insisted.

Still, pro-business DTI probably could not do otherwise but peg the Noche Buena costing to the minimum wage. 

If DTI had pegged it, say at P1,000, it would have officially accepted the enormous gap between the minimum wage and the living wage. Whose fault then would that ultimately be but of the Marcos administration.

Living wage refers to enough earned income which allows individuals or families to have a satisfactory standard of living. At present, current minimum wages fall short of the daily living wage, estimated at P1,221 in the NCR.

In short, the DTI can’t yet bring itself to squarely face up to an exploitative economic system, forcing it to give its consent to carelessly celebrate borderline poverty with a P500 Noche Buena.