Last year, workers faced severe challenges in their wages, benefits and working conditions as they were caught in the vise of economic difficulties brought about by the cost-of-living crisis and escalating intramurals between the two leading political dynasties in the country.

While the average inflation of 3.2% in 2024 was almost half compared to 2023, it continued to erode the purchasing power of wages. Relatively higher food prices also disproportionately hurt minimum wage earners and informal workers with 4.3% inflation for the bottom 30% of the income households. Thus, the demand for another round of minimum wage increases in 2024 was a recurring theme for organized labor. The campaign for a wage hike was two-pronged, with wage bills for a P150 increase filed in Congress and in the regional wage boards. 

The Senate approved a P100 increase in the minimum wage in February 2024. This advance was a result of organized labor’s successful leveraging of the rift between the two chambers of Congress over the latest move to amend the Constitution. The Senate stood pat against charter change and instead enacted the salary increase, but the reverse was the case in the House of Representatives. Despite conducting hearings on pending wage hike bills, the House committee on labor sat on the proposal and basically killed it. 

In contrast with this inaction on the workers’ demand for a wage adjustment, the House was fast and furious with the quad committee’s inquiry into the connections among the war on drugs and extrajudicial killings during President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration as well as the illegal offshore gambling hubs and the blue ribbon committee’s investigation of the confidential funds of the Office of Vice President Sara Duterte and the Department of Education during her tenure as its chief.

The year ended with no legislated wage hike but with wage orders for several regions. Still, minimum wages in all the regions—including those which had an increase, like Metro Manila, Calabarzon, Cebu and Central Luzon—remained below the official poverty line even if the threshold was assailed for being too low, as the controversy over the P64 daily food budget revealed. With the wage boards perpetuating a system of poverty wages, calls for the abolition of provincial rates became popular.

Philhealth funds

On another front, organized labor and civil society allies fought a defensive war to keep Philhealth funds devoted to improving benefits to members and providing services for indigents, as mandated by the Universal Health Care Act. As much as P60 billion of Philhealth funds were transferred by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to fund unprogrammed items in the national budget before the Supreme Court in October stopped the last tranche of P29.9 billion. The labor coalition Nagkaisa was an intervenor in the Supreme Court case to oppose the transfer of P90 billion of Philhealth funds to the national treasury.

Another battle erupted in December when the congressional bicameral conference committee removed the subsidy for Philhealth along with cuts in other social services. Nagkaisa led protests in Metro Manila and Cebu—including a big rally on Mendiola—to call for the restoration of the Philhealth subsidy and the budget for social services. 

But President Marcos Jr. did not heed the popular clamor as he signed the 2025 national budget by yearend with the much-assailed budget insertions for “ayuda” kept intact. Among these was the P26 billion unprogrammed budget for Akap, or the Ayuda para sa Kapos sa Kita Program, which has been criticized as funding for electoral patronage and tagged as the brainchild of House Speaker Martin Romualdez. This means that formal and informal workers will now have to beg politicians for assistance for medical and other emergencies instead of getting health insurance as a right. 

As if on cue, the Commission on Elections allowed the distribution of “ayuda” even during the midterm elections in May, breaking with the long-established prohibition on disbursement of public money during the campaign period—a ban based on the fact that doles are easily exploited as a means for vote buying. 

Prospects for 2025

The start of the new year greets workers with a higher social security contribution of 5% to be deducted from their wages. This will result in lower take-home pay for private-sector laborers. To keep the Social Security System afloat while easing the burden on workers, the government should subsidize the employee share. This is a tough task as the Marcos Jr. administration would rather have workers and the poor solicit “ayuda” from politicians. It promises to be another plank of organized labor’s demand for quality public services and universal social protection.

Even as demands for higher pay, lower prices, more jobs and decent work remain very popular issues during the election period, the chances of positive outcomes for workers are bleak because political dynasties, which are evolving from fat to obese, dominate the landscape. Workers have no allies either in the two main political dynasties—dubbed the “House of Polvoron” and the “House of Fentanyl,” which will be fighting for supremacy in May.

Continuing recent trends, many labor-based groups have been eased out of the party list system as it has been swamped by electoral vehicles for politicians who cannot compete in district polls. The party list system has warped into  another pathway for members of obese dynasties to enter the House through the backdoor.

Nonetheless, groups such as Partido Manggagawa (PM) are engaging with local candidates for the establishment of public laundromats and whole-day childcare centers to ease the care burdens of employed and unemployed women. Along with such low-hanging fruits, PM is also campaigning for the passage of the Prevention of Adolescent Pregnancy bill in response to the crisis level of teenage mothers. Against the tide of sleek TV and FB ads of national candidates, PM is conducting information dissemination in working-class communities for four imperatives, or what it calls “Apat na Dapat”: wage hike, regular jobs, social services and national sovereignty.

Workers will have to endure worse economic difficulties as political infighting heightens in 2025 and the remaining years of the Marcos Jr. administration. But this situation also motivates organized labor to engage with public outrage over wanton government corruption and dynastic political dominance. A big multisectoral rally in January promises to jumpstart a robust movement for good governance, in which workers’ demands should be embedded and integral.

Judy Ann Miranda is secretary general of Partido Manggagawa and a labor feminist. This piece is an expanded version of a letter to the editor that appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Daily Guardian in Iloilo in the first week of January.

Read more: In 2022, crisis in incomes and jobs pummeled labor sector