Senator Alan Peter Cayetano and Party List Rep. Neri Colmenares are wasting their saliva trying to appeal to President BS Aquino and the yellow legislators to reconsider the proposal to raise the Social Security System pension by P2,000. The president has vetoed the proposed bill and Cayetano is urging his fellow legislators to put an end to this habit of the executive branch of vetoing important laws passed by Congress, but we doubt it, because the yellow congressmen have admitted they do not want to embarrass the “popular” President BS.
So there you have it—these representatives of the people are beholden to their patron and think it is more important to save the face of the president—and to hell with all these pensioners who have earned the right to the piddling amount that government gives them—money that they faithfully contributed hoping it would help them in their twilight years. But ask any ordinary pensioner and he’d tell you the amount is not even enough to cover the cost for their maintenance medicines.
Rep. Neri Colmenares—whom voters would elect twice into office as senator if that were possible—disputes claims by the SSS leadership that the fund is facing insolvency, saying that the increase could be accommodated if collections were improved. If it were left to us, we’d like to see these delinquent employers smoked out and hung to dry.
It’s true, we have heard of employers who delay the payment of SSS contributions because they use the money for something else or park it in banks to earn interest. Some even cheat on the remittances, recording a lower amount of contribution by the employee so that they (employers) would pay a lower counterpart contribution. And these workers—mostly daily and minimum wage earners, are none the wiser because the amount reflected in their SSS contributions seems higher than what has been deducted from their salary. (Poor Representative “call me Neri” Colmenares—he had to postpone his privilege speech because many of his colleagues in Congress were no show. Are they on extended leave, these legislators?)
The way these SSS officials put it, you’d think the pension fund is gasping for breath yet they can afford to give themselves overly generous salaries, perks, benefits and bonuses amounting to millions. And why is it that this government finds it so easy to source funds for pet projects like the Conditional Cash Transfer Program—the euphemism for dole outs from the DSWD that thinks nothing of wasting our money, holding so-called “family camping” events in expensive resorts. Don’t get us wrong—we don’t mind helping those who have lesser in life but it seems to us that this government has skewed priorities. The pensioners earned the right to that pension because they contributed over the years of hard work and paid taxes, but government says it does not have money to increase pensions but can readily produce the budget for doleouts for people who have made it their profession to be panhandlers or professionally jobless.
SSS might as well be called the SDS—the Social Disservice Commission because this agency is notorious for showing disrespect to seniors, employees in many branches are rude (even guards), waste time at work with mindless gossip unmindful of the growing line of people processing papers, and seem to take pleasure in disapproving death and disability claims, or if they do approve, it takes a long wait with the claimant spending a lot of money and wasting time going back for follow ups, complainants told us. And yes, there are still syndicates who take out loans in the name of unsuspecting members in cahoots with SSS insiders. Meantime, the officials are paid hefty salaries for sitting and holding meetings that entitle them to honoraria.
Meantime, the yellow ones are belatedly proposing at least P1,000 increase in the pension amount but guess what—they will also increase the amount of contributions from members. What, more money to pay the salaries of the SSS execs? “Gigisahin tayo sa sariling mantika,” as one of our buddies put it.
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