You see them everywhere—the fathers pushing battered pedicabs under the hot sun, the mothers calculating a supermarket bill with trembling hands, hoping the few coins left in her pocket will suffice. And yet, despite the backbreaking work, the pinched budgets, the hopes bound with fraying hope, brutal reality: it painfully costs to reside in the Philippines, but pay is laughingly meager. The numbers just do not square, and to boot, the mighty feign they do. It is an evil joke, to be honest.
A new college graduate is blessed to get a job for P15,000 monthly—after deducting taxes, that’s only enough for rent, fare, and food. A sack of rice, of course, already costs more than P2,500, and onions—onions!—reached a record P700 per kilo. Everything else goes up except the one that must not: wages. The typical Filipino is stuck in a money seesaw, with expenses always rising and never budging, and families having to live paycheck to paycheck or, for most, on credit. What’s so maddening about it is that the government officials, the same ones who are supposed to be making sure there is a fair wage, are obstinately out of touch.
You hear them remind others to “Magtipid kayo” (Save up) or “Pumili ng mas murang pagkain” (Eat cheap food) as if poverty is a question of poor consumer decision. As they sanction billions of confidential funds, show up in galas dressed in designer barongs, and flaunt their five-star vacations at our expense—expenses that come out of the mouths of these people they scold into tightening their belts. And do not forget those corporate overlords who treat employees like disposable machines. A call center agent works the graveyard shift, serving irate foreign customers for P18,000 a month, while his CEO receives millions in bonuses.
A construction worker risks his life building condominiums he could never dream of affording, for a day’s wage that can only pay for a jeepney ride and canned sardines and rice lunch. Even government workers, who think that they are sheltered by salary standardization, usually see their salaries gobbled up by supposedly unlimited deductions, so they barely manage to make ends meet. What do they do? They quit. The top nurses, engineers, and teachers flee abroad to countries that pay them what they’re worth, and who can fault them?
A Filipino nurse earns P20,000 monthly, while her Canadian counterpart earns the same in a week. OFWs remit billions to keep the economy going but at what cost? Children have no idea of their parents, families hear voices on a screen, and generations are formed out of absence and longing. The Philippines is a nation that exports its people since it could no longer sustain them. And what about the left-behinds? They hustle.
A full-time teacher moonlights selling beauty products, a government administrative personnel takes his habal-habal for a joyride after office hours, and students work to make both education and online peddling happen just so they could send money home. Everyone is exhausted, everyone is hanging on by a thread, but the system never changes because the people who run it never have to live it.
The sucky thing? Filipinos are patient. Too patient. We have this strange knack for laughing at our own misfortune, joking about our “petsa de peligro” moments, downplaying economic gaps with a frustrated “Ganito talaga ang buhay.” (That’s just the way life is.) But do we have to? Do men and women have to work themselves to death just to eke out a living? Does living hand-to-mouth have to be such an endless, untameable game?
It shouldn’t. But until the powers that be wake up—or the people wake them up—the vicious cycle persists. The cost of living will increase, wages will still be criminally low, and Filipinos will still push every peso to the breaking point, while the ones responsible sleep soundly, dreaming of their next foreign shopping extravaganza.
