EDITORIAL - Crack the whip, not write an edict

Workers will always seek higher wages and employers will always try to avoid giving raises if they can. That is a fact of life and should not be something that would provoke an unnecessary conflict between the two parties.

Both parties need each other. Both recognize that. That there is a perennial conflict over wages comes with the territory so to speak. It is like a game, if it were not so serious. One pushes the envelope, the other pushes back. Whoever blinks loses a turn but not the game, which is forever.

Unfortunately, what is clear to both parties is not as clear to outsiders. Take Congress. While it has the power to legislate, wages are a matter of economics, not legislation. To believe it can successfully legislate wages is the height of congressional ignorance.

If Congress dares to legislate wages, and there is no doubt it can, it will be a piece of legislation that will only be good on paper. Not reflective of the true economic values that go into wage determination, wage laws will only distort economic pictures, not clarify them.

What Congress should do, if it is all primed to legislate economic measures, is to enact laws that would not just strengthen enforcement of just compensation but also put in place strict sanctions against those that would take economic opportunity at the expense of others.

For the greatest setback in this country's desire to attain parity with other countries in the attainment of better standards of living for its workers is the failure of government to enforce laws that make employment a meaningful and beneficial undertaking.

This failure of government is not only apparent in the desperately low incomes of Filipino workers but also in the unrestrained migration of Filipinos for better employment opportunities abroad.

An even worse indicator of the failure of government to ensure that a more equitable employment picture obtains in the country is the runaway crime rate. The resort to criminal activity is almost always a proof that gainful employment through legal means is just nowhere to be seen.

Again, there is no need for Congress to legislate wages because it will never correct a situation whose remedy lies elsewhere. The only remedy Congress can propose is to give government the whip and the compulsion to crack it.