The mall as an essential business

By William R. Adan .

NAAWAN, Misamis Oriental – What may be considered as essential business establishments or industries are not just those which produce food and products needed by people to survive but also the industries and businesses, big and small, where the backward and forward linkages in their operation create and maintains a cycle that continuously provides jobs and incomes to many people, allowing them, thereby, to buy foods, medicines and other needs basic for the survival of their family.

The mall is a case in point.

The opening of malls is of great help in jumpstarting the economy while containing at the same time the pandemic.

The mall is a one-stop-shop, where you can almost have what you need and want, a marketplace where the sellers and the buyers are confined into a manageable space where the best health protocols against the dreaded disease can easily be enforced and observed with much less difficulty compared to wet markets and independent stores and shops.

In the backward and forward economic linkages attendant to a mall operation, thousands are involved and earn their livelihood.

While malls are owned by big capitals, their operations are actually run by various entrepreneurs – from luxury items to food and other essential household products. A lot of people earn their keep inside the mall hired by the mall owner to maintain the safety, cleanliness, and security of the establishment. Mall tenants, the owners of shops, stores, food marts, and other sellers, hire various service workers, too, which could run in thousands in supermalls.

Now, consider the backward linkages in mall operation. The suppliers of the products sold in the mall hire purchasers, truck drivers and assistants, mechanics, warehousemen, and office personnel. The production of goods and supplies in factories, processing plants and farms, and in plants producing packaging materials, also employ great numbers. The raw materials used in factories, processing plants, the farm inputs (fertilizers, pesticides) in farm production operation employ numerous workers, too, not to mention the people employed in the production of spare parts for machines and vehicles necessary in the whole business, and so on.

In the forward linkages, consider the mall patrons, who in going to the mall indirectly hire jeep and taxi drivers, bus drivers and conductors, while earning incomes for their proprietors, who plow back their proceeds to maintain the enterprise. Consider those who work in gas stations, in-car shops that service the maintenance of transport vehicles, and the eateries along the way that provide affordable meals to commuters, and many other interlinking services that make the economy going.

All those who are earning from production to distribution pay taxes that support the lives of our civil servants and state security forces.

All who are earning buy food for their families and, thus, support food production.

Without job and income, the family, the economy, and the government will collapse.

He was fuming mad like a raging bull, charging the network with this and that crime, and swore to high heaven or low hell to padlock it by any and all means. Thus, his Solicitor General solicited the Supreme Court via quo warranto the closure of the network. And wanting to please their owners, his lapdogs in Congress wagged their tails and sat down and shitted on the bills to renew the network’s franchise. The franchise was allowed to lapse. The National Telecommunication Commission issued the Cease and Desist order, forcing ABS- CBN off the air.

If he were in Twitter his tweet would likely be “as I told you .” He cannot be less happy. But the drama does not simply end here. The script foretells a much happier ending for the scriptwriter.

Congress now will hasten to pass a bill and he will gladly sign it into law at no time at all. This makes him a magnanimous forgiving savior of ABS-CBN and its thousands of employees.

What wonderful respite at this time when his regime sags from China’s increasing aggression in the West Philippine Sea, the coronavirus invasion, and the hypocritical assistance given us by his most favored ally in curbing the pandemic; and when his ill-conceived response to the pandemic suffered from incoherent ground policies and dismal strategies, now ushering prospects as scary, if not more, than the dreaded disease.

But here’s the saving grace for the Duterte regime in this pandemic.

It is in admitting the truth, historically inscribed in RA 11469, the Bayanihan Act to heal as One, that under its watch 18 million Filipino families or 90 million of the 110 million (82 percent) of the population of the country have become the poorest of the poor, contrary to the robust and rosy economy it has painted in the last three years.

The truth shall set you free. No one lives forever in deceit.

(William R. Adan, Ph.D., is retired professor and former chancellor of Mindanao State University at Naawan, Misamis Oriental. -Mindanews)