Labor group bats for national minimum wage scheme

File photo shows laborers in a factory at the Mactan Export Processing Zone (MEPZ) in Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu. (Photo from the Facebook account of the MEPZ Workers Alliance)

MANILA, Philippines — While it welcomed a lawmaker’s suggestion to replace the current wage regionalization scheme with a wage clustering system, Partido Manggagawa (PM) stressed on Tuesday that enacting a unified national minimum wage is best for Filipino workers.

Manila 3rd District Rep. Joel Chua previously made the suggestion which PM said is welcome in the sense that it was founded on a “recognition of the failure of the existing wage fixing systems.

PM National Chairman Rene Magtubo emphasized that despite wage clustering being better than regionalization, “one national minimum wage is best.”

“We agree, as Rep. Chua asserts, that wage regionalization has led a huge gap between wages of regions that are not substantiated by differences in cost of living, and also has led to complexity in implementation as the DOLE [Department of Labor and Employment] has to monitor almost 50 minimum wages across the country,” he added.

PM said in a statement that it is pushing for a national minimum wage and that differences between wages should be based on seniority, skills, and productivity, regardless of region.

The implementation of a regional wage took effect after the ratification of the 1989 Wage Rationalization Act.

But labor leaders have since criticized this wage scheme, with Federation of Free Workers’ Sonny Matula previously saying that the needs of workers in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao is no different than that of workers in Metro Manila.

“Also, while we insist that a replacement to the wage regionalization mechanism is also overdue, let us not lose sight of the immediate demand for a P150 across-the-board legislated wage recovery,” Magtubo further said.

The ball is now in the hands of the House of Representatives in passing a counterpart bill to the Senate-approved P100 daily minimum wage increase among private workers in the country.