Oil and food prices going up, wages going down

Real wages are going down because the value of the peso is watered down by skyrocketing inflation rates. The government is very effective in controlling wages but is powerless vis-a-vis the successive increases in the prices of crude oil, gasoline, kerosene, and Liquefied Petroleum Gas.

Raising the prices of oil and gas products including crude, gasoline, and LPG at the height of the billions of pesos in devastation brought by supertyphoons Egay and Falcon are nonchalantly justified by the oil industry as an inevitable impact of global law of supply and demand. To me, the timing and the amount of increases were the extreme manifestations of cruelty, greed, and callousness. In the name of profiteering, the oil industry players are totally impervious to the sufferings of the Filipino people. All these are big blows to the working class who can hardly make both ends meet. It is cruel and even conscienceless, given the millions of jobless, homeless, and hopeless Filipinos.

It pains me to say this being a former senior labor attorney and HR manager of Petrophil, the old name of Petron, when it was still owned and managed by the state-owned PNOC or Philippine National Oil Company in the late ‘70’s and the early ‘80’s. As a Petron employee, I was assigned, one after another, to the three main companies of PNOC, the oil company which was Petrophil, the energy group led by PNOC Energy Development Corp., which ran the geothermal and other non-traditional sources of energy and the PNOC Shipping and Transport Corp., which owned and managed the fleet of oil tankers and vessels transporting crude from the Middle East to the old BRC or Bataan Refining Company in Limay, Bataan, and also shipping the oil products to all islands in the archipelago. Because of that experience, I gained a little knowledge of the oil industry.

With my little learning, which may be a dangerous thing, I know deep in my heart that the oil companies in the Philippines still had enough stock of oil when the global market leaders in Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Middle East countries, as well as Russia, Indonesia, and Latin America made decisions to decrease production, thereby pushing price hikes and disrupting the oil global supply chain. Having had enough supply when global prices suddenly rose up, the Philippine-based oil companies could have exercised compassion for the suffering people by postponing the price hike while its buffer supply still lasted. What they did, however, was to take advantage of the global supply movements, and seize the moment as an excuse to increase prices.

By that, they could have made a lot of profits while millions of Filipinos lost their livelihoods, their homes, and had nothing to eat. If that was not greed, then what was it? If that was not callousness, then I do not know what that was. When the president was still Ferdinand Marcos Sr., and the Energy secretary was Geronimo Velasco, the government never allowed price hikes at the height of natural calamities. There is always a way to postpone profit-making when the people are still suffering. They could do it because the government owned Petrophil but the successors like the FVR, the mother and son Aquino, and GMA all believed in the free market economy and were apostles of privatization.

The government lost control of PNOC and Petrophil, later renamed Petron, and sold it to the private sector. It is now owned by San Miguel Corp. The irony was that in 1986, I was "pirated" by SMC from Petrophil. Now, my two former employer companies are controlled by the same group under the umbrella of San Miguel. My former SMC colleague, a leadership and management genius, Lubin Nepomuceno, an SMC packaging expert, was tapped by RSA to become top honcho of Petron. RSA and Lubin as well as the other industry players would never have allowed such a whopping price hike if Malacañang only made an appeal.

But the silence of the Palace is an endorsement of the oil companies' lack of social responsibility. There is no urgent or compelling call on the regional wage boards to review the current wage levels and create solutions to the worsening poverty of the working class. The government has virtually abandoned the people in their hour of greatest need.