We so badly need a social transformation

Finally, Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero acknowledged the reality that the Philippine government is the biggest violator in having its own contractual employees, which they call “casual employees.” This was my pet peeve when I was chairman of the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management in early 2000. Senator Escudero, in a TV interview, said that the government is the biggest employer with contractual employees both national and local.

What I especially liked in the statement of Senator Escudero is when he said that the government should first fix its own contractualization problem before slamming the private sector. When President Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte signed the E.O. to end “endo,” he said that it doesn’t amend the Labor Code, so he urged Congress to make this revision. So let’s hear it from Senator Escudero to stop endo through legislation. It’s only the “pakyaw” system of contractualization that should remain.

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Last Wednesday, I was invited to join a forum dubbed the Ayala-UPSE Regional Economic Forum at the Cebu City Sports Center with guest speaker Dr. Raul V. Fabella, professor emeritus of the UP School of Economics. Unfortunately, I missed the welcome remarks of my good friend, Mr. Jose Rene Almendras. managing director and Public Affairs Group head of the Ayala Corp. Reactors to the speaker were Mr. Virgilo “Nonoy” Espeleta and Mr. Fernando “Perry” Fajardo, former executive director of the Cebu Business Club.

The theme of the forum was “Towards Inclusive Capitalism in the Philippines.” Basically the talk of Prof. Fabella focused on capitalism and the crisis of inclusion, income inequality vs. abject poverty, and how the People’s Republic of China freed itself from poverty. So he asks: Where do we go from here? Is income inequality the real enemy or is it abject poverty?

He uses the People’s Republic of China during the time of Chairman Deng Xiaoping as the start of China’s reduction of poverty. He cites Deng’s pragmatic Socialism as the reason why 600 million Chinese crossed the poverty line and the incidence of poverty fell from 88 percent in 1980 to 6.5 percent in 2014. He calls it the greatest social transformation in human history that turned China into the second largest economy in the world.

He cites the Three Gorges Dam and the Beijing-Lhasa Railway infrastructure development as some of the reasons for China’s prosperity today. At the end of his talk I approached him and asked him: “Why use China’s economic miracle as your example for a talk about Capitalism?” He laughed and said this question was asked of him by most pundits. Indeed, China achieved an economic miracle because they threw away the teachings of Marx and Lenin and embraced Capitalism, while retaining the Communist political system. Of course, Prof. Fabella wasn’t advocating a shift to a Communist state or political way of life.

In my view, we Filipinos, through the years, have survived decades of corruption by our political leaders through the Filipino diaspora of our Overseas Filipino Workers. But as the new millennium dawned upon us, the Business Process Outsourcing industry was introduced to the Philippines during the time of then Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. She was also responsible for approving the South Road Properties project, the pet project of Mayor Tomas Osmeña.

Mind you, former Department of Trade & Industry secretary Manuel “Mar” Roxas and his minions claimed credit for this in Facebook. I refute this claim because GMA’s daughter Luli even held office in our building in JE-SA without bodyguards. So I asked her what she was doing in Cebu, she told me that she was working on bringing the BPO industry to our shores. The rest is history!

What we need to improve our economy so everybody can join our economic growth is to come up with an honest-to-goodness societal change. Old practices, for instance, that worsen our already bad traffic situation like funeral wakes in chapels by the roadside should be disallowed and we encourage each barangay to build chapels that do not disturb traffic. Then there’s the funeral cortege where mourners still walk behind their dead relative --this has to be stopped and as I said, it starts with ourselves! Call it a “social transformation” that Filipinos badly need to commit themselves to!

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