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Friday, March 29, 2024

Labor hits fudged ‘food basket’ costs

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THE labor group All Workers Unity on Thursday assailed the Aquino administration for deliberately and erroneously reducing the food and non-food portions of extreme poverty threshold pegged at P50 and P21 per person per day, respectively, to make it appear that the minimum wage rates in all regions, like the P481 per day in Metro Manila, are above the poverty line.

“However, the new food basket threshold left the minimum wage earners malnourished and ‘food poor’,” according to Alex Alegre of AWU.

Alegre explained the Philippine Statistics Authority released the new “food basket” data from the Official Poverty Statistics of the Philippines for the first quarter of 2015 that the country’s average poverty threshold is P10,969.

At P10,969, the food threshold is pegged at P7,638, or P50 per person per day, while the non-food threshold is estimated at P3,331, or P21 per person per day, he explained.

Alegre said the PSA decided the P21 per person per day was “enough” to cover expenditures on clothing and footwear; housing; fuel, light and water; maintenance and minor repairs; rental of occupied dwelling units; medical care; education; transportation and communication; non-durable furnishings; household operations; and personal care and effects.

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He said the Food and Nutrition Research Institute website displayed a nutritionally adequate one-day menu sample for a single adult.

At P50 per day, the FNRI said workers could have for breakfast daing na bisugo, fried egg, rice, powdered whole milk and ripe papaya; paksiw na galunggong, munggo gisado, rice and latundan for lunch; breaded pork, pinakbet, rice for supper; taho and boiled camote and fruit juice for snacks in the morning and afternoon.

“It does not take a genius to understand that P50 per day per person does not satisfy any nutritional requirement. What kind of government sets a standard budget for food that can hardly fill an empty stomach to go to work?” Alegre said.

Alegre said based on the Family Living Wage statistics, the nutritionally adequate one-day menu would cost almost P130 per person, or P750 for a family of five or six per day.

With this and a conservative estimate of the non-food needs, Alegre said the FLW is supposedly now pegged at P1,089 per day.

However, he said the PSA and the national government abandoned the FLW computation of poverty threshold in 2008 and changed the computation of the new food basket.

“You don’t know poverty,” Alegre told President Aquino.

“The recent data on poverty has been erroneously used by the Department of Labor and Employment to brag that the minimum wage rates in all regions are above poverty line,” Alegre said.

“AWU slams the Aquino administration for setting the poverty threshold to extreme poverty and the food threshold to levels of hunger and malnutrition,” he said.

Ironically, Alegre said the PSA defined the poverty threshold as the “minimum income required for a family/individual to meet the basic food and non-food requirements.”

While the food threshold is defined as the “minimum income required for a family/individual to meet the basic food needs, which satisfies the nutritional requirements for economically necessary and socially desirable physical activities.”

“The P481-NCR minimum wage and the other thousand wage rates in the country cannot afford the FNRI food requirement cost. This means families of below and minimum wage earners in the country is likely to go hungry or malnourished, therefore, food poor,” Alegre pointed out.

AWU warns labor organizations to be cautious in adopting the poverty threshold as the living wage and as basis for wage hike demands. The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) recently declared that based on the poverty threshold, the real value of the minimum wage rates in the country only needs to be restored to their nominal value.

AWU urged the TUCP to review the FLW computation and join the call for an urgent and quality relief, the National Minimum Wage of P750 daily for the private sector and P16,000 monthly for government employees.

“Workers suffer the same hunger and malnutrition as the Kidapawan farmers due to the same neglect and cover-up of the government. We don’t need false data. We need wages that can feed our family decently. In the upcoming International Labor Day on May 1, we will amplify the demands for a National Minimum Wage that is close to the real living standards,” Alegre said.

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