The
Gross Domestic Product increase claimed by PNoy administration and the recent
National Statistic Coordination Board research result on high incidence of poverty
and hunger in the Philippines are two clear contradicting pictures of the
Philippine society.
While
the few enjoyed their economic and political control and manipulation, majority
of the citizens are suffering massive poverty.
Poorest
regions, provinces and communities can be found in Mindanao resulting to
massive migration to the urban and rural centers as well as abroad. Those have
been the option for the labor-forces living the countryside to search for
greener pasture.
Though
we have a rich agricultural (land and coastal) resources, but it turned out to
be a gift for foreign and big business corporations.
Vast
lands and mineral reserves have been extracted and used by multinational
corporations displacing and harassing the Indigenous Peoples and poor
communities. Aside from pushing them into poverty risk, this extractive policy
on natural and mineral reserves has also dangerous and destructive effects.
In
the Mindanao, the struggle for the Right to Self-Determination (RSD) is not the
root cause of poverty among the communities but it is the framework of the
Philippine government as to how these communities should control or manage
their resources. The struggle for RSD only arises when the native inhabitants’ rights
over their political, economic and cultural lives as distinct entities are
stolen from them. Militarization is always the best way to drive out the
communities and to suppress their resistance.
On
the other hand, Anak Mindanao (AMIN) Party List was dismayed by the Department
of Labor and Employment’s “no wage increase” announcement, since unemployment
and low income are interrelated causes of the poverty situation in the country.
This should not be a surprise announcement because the platform and direction
of PNoy’s economic policy is neither pro-worker nor pro-people.
The
Public-Private Partnership economic policy is a disguised face of the
implementation of the neo-liberal policies like privatization,
contractualization, deregulation, liberalization and violent militarization.
Primarily, it catered big business monopoly and repressed workers unions and
even put the workers interest in the sideline.
The
Philippine government should face the question of unemployment and workers
rights without conditions as workers and the labor forces that our country has,
is the social section that ran our economy. Workers’ rights and welfare is
integral to our electoral struggle same as all sectors as part of the
marginalized and neglected.
Anak
Mindanao (AMIN) Party List and its members in different chapters will join the
workers in the streets to push for the alternatives and to condemn the crime
against the working class by this capitalist and elitist government.
A
synchronized Mindanao-wide May 1 Protest is AMIN’s contribution to this cause.
We call on for the nationalization of the Philippine
Vital Industries! Increase Subsidies!
Equal Pay for Equal Work! Stop Privatization and Contractualization!
Manggagawang Mindanao at ng Mundo Magkaisa!
Maka-tao, Maka-kalikasan, Makatarungan at
Sustenableng Ekonomiya, Ngayon Na!
Elizabeth Padilla
for
Anak Mindanao (AMIN) Party List
National Executive Committee
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