ANAKBAYAN condemns Employers Confederation of the Philippines (Ecop) chair emeritus Donald Dee for demanding the removal of progressives in the Duterte cabinet. Oligarchs like Dee are only after the protection of big profits at the expense of workers. The only reason why oligarchs like Dee want to get rid of progressives in the Duterte government is the fear that progressive measures like a national minimum wage and scrapping of contractualization will make a big dent on their super-profits. Far from being just the work of “philosophical stuff,” the implementation of a P125-national minimum wage will help strengthen the purchasing power of Filipino working class households and hence help drive economic growth and development. Red scare tactics by oligarchs like Dee only serve to hide the fact that the wage-levels have been kept very low while they extract massive profits from the labor of Filipino workers. The abolition of the regionalization of wage levels is a positive development, and a uniform minimum wage across the country will also help in the decongestion of the national capital region and spread development in other parts of the country. Duterte can depend on patriotic and progressive elements to be on his side if he is serious in pushing for genuine pro-people reforms and in asserting national sovereignty against foreign intervention, and pursuing the peace talks while the greedy oligarchs always be looking only over their selfish interests. It was the patriotic workers, farmers, and youth who continued fighting during the Philippine-American War while oligarchs like Aguinaldo, Paterno, and Buencamino were quick to save their hides. Duterte should keep the progressives in his cabinet and get rid of greedy oligarchs instead.
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Meanwhile, we urge the new administration to finally take concrete steps towards providing free education, particularly by stopping tuition and other fees hikes, junking the K-12 program, and increasing government subsidy for stateun schools. While we laud the Duterte government’s historic steps towards an independent foreign policy and firm commitment to the peace talks, its promise of change has not been felt by the youth and the education sector. We call on Duterte to break away from the previous administrations’ neoliberal policies like tuition deregulation and the K-12 program that intensify the commercialized character of the education system to the benefit of private school owners and transform schools into diploma mills supplying cheap labor for transnational corporations. We call on Duterte to double time on making his promise of “change” true for the youth. He can start by junking the Education Act of 1982 which allows private schools to implement yearly tuition and other fees increases without government regulation. We note a 5,000-7,000-percent increase in tuition rates from P700-P2,600 in 1982 to P40,000-P80,000 in 2016 since the decreeing of the Education Act of 1982 by the late dictator Marcos. Exactly 304 private universities and 1,200 basic education institutions are hiking tuition and other fees this school year. Students of State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) also suffer from commercialization and privatization, with P43.4 billion of the total 2017 SUC budget to be collected from their own revenues, including student fees, rather than be subsidized by government. We reiterate our call for the Duterte administration to heed the people’s call for free education at all levels by providing higher state subsidy for the education sector. We also urge Duterte to hear the call of students, parents and teachers for the scrapping of the burdensome K-12 program. K-12 only benefits the oligarchs and big private school owners while forcing many young Filipinos to pay more fees or be forced to drop-out altogether. Recall that the opening of the Senior High School program earlier this school year was plagued by a drastic drop in enrolment, with over 400,000 students not proceeding to enroll in Grade 11. -Vencer Crisostomo, chairperson, Anakbayan