Business groups pool funds to create new jobs

The three biggest business organizations in the country — Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI), Employers Confederation of the Philippines (ECOP) and the Philippine Exporters Confederation (Philexport) — have decided to pool their resources to create emergency jobs in the next three to six months.

In a recent meeting, PCCI president Miguel Varela, ECOP president Donald Dee and Philexport president Sergio R. Ortiz-Luis, Jr. agreed to raise an "emergency job creation funding pool" with funds that will be contributed by their members. The money will be administered by a private foundation.

The move is the group’s way of responding to increases in the cost of living.

The National Wages and Productivity Commission (PWPC) has estimated that recent increases in the price of basic goods requires a family of six to earn P509 a day to survive. This triggered a new wave of workers’ clamor for across-the-board wage increases.

Caught in a bad economic situation where growth this year is expected to be marginal if not flat, the business community, private economic analysts and the Arroyo government’s economic team have warned that an across-the-board wage hike may prove to be disastrous to the country.

"We have to do something similar to President Roosevelt’s "New Deal" during the great American depression or the late President Diosdado Macapagal’s emergency employment program," ECOP’s Dee said.

Roosevelt extricated the US economy from a long period of depression in the 1920s by setting aside huge sums for emergency employment. The same tack was adopted by the late President Macapagal in the face of mass unemployment during his term.

The government cannot, however, initiate the program at this point because it is even worse off than the business sector. Somebody has to start it for the sake of the country. The government may help the emergency employment program gather momentum by releasing funds for its programmed infrastructure projects and bidding out those which need to be done through the build-operate-transfer (BOT) law, said Dee.

On the part of the PCCI, Varela said the group launched recently a new program called adopt-a-barangay which aims to help fight poverty. Varela said this will be redirected to job creation this year.

Ortiz-Luis volunteered his organization to lead in getting donors from among industry associations including the Federation of Filipino Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

"We understand the need to increase family income," said Dee. "But to leave the burden of making P509 a day to one member of a family will be asking him too much. The better tack is for us in the business sector to start creating new jobs."

Dee said alternative economic activities must be initiated while domestic and export industries struggle to get more solid footing. – Abe Belena, Philexport News & Features