TUCP Wants Another Wage Hike for Cebu, Davao, CdO workers

After filing a petition before the wage board in Metro Manila yesterday, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) is set to file next week the same petition for the workers in Cebu, Davao and Cagayan de Oro next week.

“It is our obligation to help our workers get what is legally and morally due them. They toil all day, sweat for grueling work hours, break their back to keep enterprises alive, and yet, are left to scrape the bottom of the barrel. The employers and our government should respond to this petition in the spirit of allowing workers partake of the blessings of a booming economy in the spirit of equity. Philippine prosperity cannot and should not be built on a permanent class of poor people,” said TUCP Partylist Rep. Raymond Mendoza in a press statement. He added: “we therefore call on the wage board to consider that the times are good and the workers deserve to receive their just share of this vastly improved and improving economy.”

Last year, the seven-man tripartite wage and productivity board approved a P20- and P10-increase in June and in November, respectively, a far cry from TUCP’s 90-peso wage increase petition.

In a four-page petition Mendoza submitted yesterday for the Metro Manila workers, TUCP asked for an P85-increase, saying the purchasing power of the latest legislated 456 peso daily minimum wage was only P362.77, “eroded by 20.45 percent.”
Meanwhile, TUCP said it still has to compute the wage hike it will ask for Cebu, Davao and Cagayan de Oro employees.