The Social Weather Stations 3rd quarter survey conducted last September came up with another piece of good news for President Duterte.
When asked if they expected their personal quality of life to improve in the next 12 months, 47 percent of respondents answered yes, while 4 percent answered no. This produced a net personal optimism rating of +42, classified “Excellent” and two points higher than the previous June survey.
When asked if they thought the Philippine economy would get better or worse, the optimists at 43 percent outnumbered the pessimists at 12 percent. The resultant net rating of +30, again “Excellent”, was three points higher than the previous quarter.
Looking backward, when asked if their lives had improved or worsened over the last 12 months, the “gainers” at 39 percent outnumbered the “losers” at 19 percent. The net gainers score of +19 is “very high”.
These latest numbers simply continue upbeat trends that generally go way back to the waning months of the previous administration. But I’ll have to say that this persistent sense of well-being also has a lot to do with people feeling good about their current President.
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In fact, the scores may have been even higher if not for a methodological change at SWS: In September, they polled a total of 1,500 respondents, whereas last June (and perhaps earlier) they polled only 1,200 respondents. The additional 300 all came from “Balance of Luzon”, with the three other regions (NCR, Visayas, Mindanao) still at 300 each.
Now it’s possible that “balance of Luzon” has twice the population of any of the other 3 regions (not likely) or that other technical reasons may justify this change (as a humble layman, I’m always open to being corrected by the experts). And if Pulse Asia made the same change, that would ease my mind—although frankly, at sampling sizes of 1,200 to 1,300, the predictive benefit of adding even more respondents is marginal.
But what may be more relevant in this case is the fact that Duterte has generally been doing poorest in the “balance of Luzon” region. I saw this in the regional breakdown of his earlier scores on drug war-related issues. So if you increase the weighting for that region, you pull down his overall rating.
I do hope there’s a far less sinister reason for this methodological change at SWS. It sends chills up my spine to think of the implications otherwise for the opinion surveys that have become a universal barometer of public sentiment, and thus the basis for democratic governance, in between our elections.
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In another piece of economic good news, Neda reports that nearly a million underemployed workers were able to get decent work as of October. Based on the October labor force survey, this means that the underemployment rate—the number of employed persons who want additional work hours—declined to 15.9 percent, or around two points lower than the same month last year.
Reducing underemployment means raising the quality as well as the value-add of work performed by our labor force. Neda now wants us to focus on policy reforms that will increase and improve the labor-force participation of women. Among them:
Full implementation of the RH Law
Improved access and affordability of child-care services
Policies that promote work-life balance, including a regulatory framework to allow part-time work and work-from-home even in the formal sector
Retraining services for women returning to the work force
Enhancing maternal and paternal benefits
Improved access of women to entrepreneurial opportunities
These are all good, pro-women, pro-employment policies. We’ll look forward to Neda driving the reforms through, including legislative remedies that may be needed if they’re not yet covered by appropriate laws.
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A large part of feeling good about one’s prospects and the economy is also feeling good about one’s safety. We’ve already heard so many anecdotes about average citizens feeling much safer now when they walk our streets at night, in spite of (or perhaps because of) all those alleged extra-judicial killings beloved by writers of lurid headlines.
Now that Congress has agreed to extend martial law in Mindanao, we’ll wager that the citizens of that region—who were in fact the strongest supporters of extension—are feeling safer. And, characteristically, Duterte has again upped the ante against his critics by telling his favorite audience—the soldiers at Army headquarters in Taguig—that he won’t rule out taking martial law nationwide if “enemies of the state” converge to try and topple the government.
Predictably, these statements raised an outcry among the usual suspects. Opposition Congressman Edcel Lagman claimed that the government victory at Marawi meant there was no longer any armed uprising to justify martial law in Mindanao. With all due respect to Cong. Edcel, we’ll still take the word of our troops on the ground over his.
For his part, leftist party-lister Carlos Zarate warned that Duterte actually wants to impose “unli” martial law. The problem with his theory is that Duterte did in fact go out of his way to ask permission from Congress first, not just once, but twice.
And Gabriela, by some twist of illogic, said the President couldn’t invoke the CPP-NPA rebellion as a reason to extend martial law now in Mindanao, since that rebellion has been around for decades and has spread nationwide. Gabriela ought to be more careful with what it says: A long-running and nationwide rebellion in fact sounds like a great reason to put the entire country under martial law.
At the end of the day, martial law is an option granted by the Constitution to the head of state, albeit hedged by all manner of preconditions and notice requirements. Whether or not that option is exercised will depend entirely on how its targets—the terrorists, rebels, drug lords, criminals—behave themselves.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.