Group laments ‘discrimination’ against farmers on Labor Day

FARMWORK With Mayon Volcano providing a stunning backdrop, farmers harvest organic rice at Barangay Pawa in Legazpi City, Albay, in this photo taken in November 2019. Farmers’ groups on Labor Day issued calls for increased wages for agricultural workers, especially in remote provinces. —Mark Alvic Esplana

MANILA, Philippines — With several farmers’ groups joining the Labor Day rally on Thursday to call for a nationwide living wage, the Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (Uma) highlighted the “discrimination” doubly experienced by farmers and agricultural workers in the country.

In a statement, Uma said that aside from “rural wage discrimination,” where those working in the capital region receive higher pay than those in remote provinces, farmers also suffer as agriculture-related work has a lower wage rate compared to other fields.

The group noted that in the Eastern Visayas region, the minimum wage of workers was at P420, just 35 percent of the family living wage (FLW) of P1,200. Agricultural workers, however, receive only P390.

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“It was bad enough that workers in the National Capital Region received a measly P645, barely 54 percent of the FLW. But the legal standard for agri-workers in the Bangsamoro [region] fell to as low as P316, [or] 26.3 percent of the FLW,” Uma said.

Meanwhile, in Batangas province, some agricultural workers “were not even paid the bare legal minimum,” as sugar workers have reportedly received as low as P280 per day, when the minimum wage for this sector was pegged at P500, the group said.

Uma further noted that on Negros Island, known as the “sugar bowl” of the country, sugarcane plantation workers earn only P333 for seedling production.

“Some tasks were priced even lower, like weeding. In these same sugar estates, the job could earn one a destitute P60 per day. In Isabela [province], the same task could even drop to P15—a whopping 1.25 percent of the FLW,” the group said.

Even the process of receiving wages was “an ordeal,” pointed out Uma, as workers “had to wait for the end of their contracts before getting paid—and by then, they were already well deep in debt.”

To address the issue of rural wage discrimination, Uma called for the creation of a policy abolishing wage rationalization in the country, a call echoed by other groups under the All Workers Unity coalition.

Signature campaign

In Baguio City, local activists marked Labor Day by launching a signature campaign supporting a proposed P1,200 national minimum living wage.

Mike Cabalda, chair of Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) in the Cordillera, said workers in the region receive a daily base wage of P470—an amount he deemed inadequate in the face of rising costs of basic goods.

Although Congress has proposed economic interventions such as House Bill No. 11376, which seeks to raise the minimum wage by P200 for low-income earners, Cabalda criticized the government’s response as consistently too late to address inflation-driven wage erosion over the years.

“Government interventions come too late each time inflation reduced the value of workers’ earnings in the past decades,” he said. —reports from Gillian Villanueva and Vincent Cabreza