The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) criticized the National Economic and Development Authority’s (NEDA) outrageous claim that a Filipino can thrive on just ₱64 for three meals daily.

TUCP, in a statement Thursday, said the low poverty threshold is an insult to Filipino workers.

 “How can anyone expect families to survive on such a meager amount? It said this assertion is not just absurd; it’s a slap in the face to those struggling to make ends meet.

Grilled by senators during the budget briefing of the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) on how the Government classifies food-poor Filipinos, NEDA Secretary-General Arsenio Balisacan said, “As of 2023, a monthly food threshold for a family of five is ₱9,581, that comes out [to] about ₱64 per person.”

“Is our country’s chief economic planner on another planet to not witness the crippling impact of skyrocketing food inflation, especially rice and electricity inflation, to Filipinos every day? This is a severe insult to Filipino workers who sacrifice their blood, sweat, and tears to do honest, hard work but are reduced to a meal worth just ₱20! This is not just offensive—it’s dangerous. It threatens to undermine the much-needed ₱150 across-the-board wage hike proposed by TUCP as the Government and employers abuse these silly statistics to dismiss the survival crisis of the working class—to make ends meet,” TUCP Vice President Luis Corral said.

TUCP, the country’s largest labor center, expressed deep indignation that workers are being forced by their own government to endure standards and benchmarks that condemn them to perpetual hunger and a life of eking out a living on scraps.

“Without the immediate passage of House Bill No. 7871, which seeks to legislate an across-the-board wage recovery increase of ₱150 in the daily wages of private sector workers nationwide, workers can never bring nutritious food to their family’s table, resulting in malnourished children and sick workforce with their productivity and competitiveness dropping like a rock,” Corral added.

He added: “Is this how our economic managers advise our President? Is this how economic planning and wage orders are devised? Really? Are our technocrats really basing their strategy on numbers that have no relation to the real prices of rice, poultry, meat, fish, and vegetables in the public market? Foisting that outrageous food poverty threshold is a grave disservice to the Marcos Administration, which vows to reduce poverty to single digit, not by statistical gimmickry but by actually improving the quality of lives and livelihood of every Filipino. Our economic managers are badly serving the Filipino people by building a supposedly robust economy on the backs of hungry people and poverty-level wages.”

While the food poverty threshold according to NEDA is at least ₱64 per individual per meal, the Ateneo Policy Center estimates that the government-prescribed daily healthy food guide ‘Pinggang Pinoy’ for a family of five would cost ₱693.

He said the National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC) last estimated the family living wage at ₱917 in 2008.

“No wonder Filipino students are lagging behind international education rankings as they suffer or even die from malnutrition—principally because under the regional wage board system for 35 years of scraps as increases, workers’ wages failed to keep up with the rising cost of living and to fulfill the Constitutional right to a living wage,” Corral said.

Malnutrition

According to UNICEF Philippines, every day, 95 children in the Philippines die from malnutrition, and 27 out of 1,000 Filipino children do not get past their fifth birthday.

The data showed that a third of Filipino children are stunted or short for their age.  

In the Programme for International Student Assessment 2018 survey among 15-year-old students from 79 countries, Filipino students scored lowest in reading and second to lowest in mathematics and science. According to the World Bank, nearly one in three Filipino children under five years of age is stunted primarily due to poverty.

“Congress can no longer afford to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to these absurd official statistics and skewed standards that distort the harsh reality faced by Filipino workers and their families,” Corral said.

With high prices and low wages as the most urgent issues plaguing our nation, he said Congress must urgently pass TUCP’s ₱150 wage hike proposal to end the crisis of poverty wages further eroded by surging prices.