Urban poor group calls for meaningful wage increase, condemns ‘below the minimum’ wage of contractual workers

PRESS RELEASE l November 11, 2011
KALIPUNAN NG DAMAYANG MAHIHIRAP
REFERENCE: Carlito Badion, Kadamay national vice chair (09393873736)

Members of urban poor group Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (Kadamay) call today for a meaningful wage increase for our regular, contractual and casual workers. They demand for the P125 legislated wage increase across-the-board nationwide, saying that our workers cannot feed their family with the P404 minimum wage.

“The additional P22 cost of living allowance cannot protect our workers from the effects of price hikes of basic commodities, especially those who have contractual and casual employment,” said Ka Mameng Deunida, chairman emeritus of Kadamay.

“Our families are starving while we are dying as contractual laborers working 10 hours a day, and we receive wage lower than the standard set by the government,” a construction worker said who joined the group’s protest at the main office of the Department of Labor and Employment in Intramuros, Manila.

"This agency, referring to DOLE, has been in connivance with the big corporations in endorsing contractual employment for our workers who suffered from job insecurity but lower than the minimum wage set by the government,” said Ka Mameng citing DOLE Order No. 18-02.

“The said order has even taught the capitalist on how to implement contractualization through different deceptive measures, and has resulted to the gradual liquidation of unions of workers,” she added.

“Millions of farmers and farm workers, because of landlessness and lack of sources of livelihood in the countryside, migrate to urban centers in search of employment” said Ka Mameng. “The Aquino government and the past regime could only offer contractual and abusive employment to a very few of these migrants. Many of them eventually become what we call today the urban poor.

Unless the Aquino administration implements genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization program, in cannot solve the problem of urban poverty caused by urban migration, and abusive employment system that follow the dictates of neoliberal policies. ###