Wage hike petition. Petitioners prepare for consultation

CEBU, Philippines - Living Wage Coalition-Cebu, which earlier petitioned for wage hike in Central Visayas, will start discussing today various concerns in preparation for the scheduled public consultation on their petition tomorrow.

Michael Valle, secretary general of the Alliance of Progressive Labor-Visayas, lamented how the other provinces in the region are taking the issue on wage increase.

"Like in Bohol, during their public consultation there, nobody wants a wage increase. The coalition strongly believes that a wage adjustment, gikinahanglan gyud," Valle told The Freeman.

The Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board-7 scheduled a public consultation at 1 p.m. tomorrow at the Sarrosa Hotel in Mabolo, Cebu City.

The Partido ng Manggagawa, one of the members of the coalition, earlier said that they will continue to push for wage increase amidst the wage hike moratorium being pushed by the different chambers of commerce in regions 6, 7, and 8.

PM-Cebu is one of the over 50 labor organizations and unions which asked for a P132 daily wage increase for workers in Central Visayas last October.

The coalition has already submitted their opposition on the wage moratorium before the RTWPB-7 last December.

The country's biggest labor union, the Associated Labor Unions-Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, filed a separate petition asking for P90 daily wage hike for all workers in Central Visayas.

Among the grounds cited by the coalition for the P132 wage adjustment are the insufficient increases from the past, the reduction of the purchasing power of peso, oil price hike, inflation rate, increases in the prices of basic commodities, tuition fee, power rate and living wage. — (FREEMAN)