Living Dangerously in 2007; More of the Same in 2008

By the Policy Study, Publication and Advocacy (PSPA)
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)

Let us bow off the beaten path of the usual yearenders. In this issue analysis, we look at how the Filipino people fared in 2007: What they went through in their daily lives, how they behaved in politics, what signs they saw written on the wall of faith - or despair.

Many families today see their future in giving up a son or daughter for an overseas work that they believe will pull them up from the rut of poverty they have known all their lives. In most cases, both parents work abroad thus enabling them to send their children to college. Children eventually end up working overseas also – whether in the cold deserts of Uzbekistan, in the war zones of the Middle East, or the menacing oilfields of Africa - with jobs often far different from the courses taken in college or technical school. In the year 2007, some 1.013 million Filipinos bade goodbye to their families to fly to 190 destinations, surpassing the yearly one-million deployment of contract workers by 1.3 percent.1 The scene of tearful departures as 2,800 Filipinos leave the airports everyday has become just a routine.

Government takes pride in overshooting the yearly target of labor export, attributing to labor deployment the remittances that reached $11.9 billion this year. It aims to better that in 2008 with a target of $14 billion in remittances.

Do Filipinos believe that President Gloria M. Arroyo has solved the unemployment problem in the country? The statistics of the increasing number of Filipinos in search of work abroad makes that claim absurd, worse, a bad joke. The costs of this labor draft are epic, even – in terms of families ruined, of contract workers left to the abuse of their employers and recruiters, racial and job discrimination, of beheadings, and of suicides committed every now and then. In one month alone in the U.S. east coast this year, four Filipinos took their lives, two of them grade school teachers.

For the rest of the Filipinos, a job in another country will remain elusive. This is because fewer youths are able to complete their education while the quality of learning is fast deteriorating. Recently, the Department of Education (DepEd) revealed that the number of children enrolled in elementary schools dropped from 90.10 percent in schoolyear 2001-2002 to 84.4 percent in 2005-2006. The dropout rates posted record levels: 10.57 percent in the elementary level and a bigger 15.81 percent in high school. As a result, only five out of 10 enrollees finished grade school, down from six four years ago; of those who went to high school, only five graduated compared to six four years ago.

Out-of-school youth

Consequently, the number of out-of-school children (ages 6-15) increased by 200 percent, from about 1.87 million to a staggering 3.1 million.2 The quality of education is way below standard, with achievement rates of Filipino grade and high school students particularly in science and mathematics among the lowest in the world.

The education budget earmarked for 2008, which is P141 billion – assuming this will be spent transparently and cleanly - is not enough to address the perennial shortages of classrooms, seats, textbooks, and teachers totaling 50,000.

Among most people, getting children to school let alone college has not just been an uphill battle but a battle lost given that daily subsistence is only less than $2. Income inequality has become severe: the US$12.4 billion net worth of the country’s 10 richest families is equivalent to the combined yearly income of the poorest 9.8 million households.3 This horrendous income gap is the result of the concentration of economic wealth among a few transnational corporations and the domestic oligarchs, no thanks to the globalization policies championed by the Arroyo government. For instance, the latest agriculture census shows that less than one-third of total landowners still own more than 80 percent of the country’s agricultural land. Fifty-two percent of the farms in the country covering 51 percent of total farm area remain under tenancy, lease, and other forms of tenurial arrangement.4 Seventy percent of the country’s poor lives in the rural areas.

Although the skewed socio-economic structure yields the endemic poverty, efforts to ease the economic burden of the people in 2007 were shattered by Arroyo’s pro-business policies including a wage freeze and shooting down bills that would have increased the daily minimum wage of the poor. The current minimum wage covers only 45.6 percent of the required “living wage” of P793, as estimated by the National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC). It is even worse in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), considered the country’s most depressed area, where the daily income is equivalent to only 17 percent of the required daily wage. Who says that the country will achieve “first world” status in 10 years?