May Day Greetings
Amidst the façade of progress the present system afforded to brag about, most people still notice the same old tensions continue to prevail.
That despite claiming about decent wages, wider health coverages, greater collective bargaining rights, and less discriminatory mesaures, the tensions between the rich and the poor continues with the latter heavily affected by the former's invented crisis.
And these involves increasing prices of goods and services, less wages, inadequate services, unfair collective bargaining, harassments towards unions, and illegal profit-seeking motives like sweatshop labour with its virtual prison-like conditions.
So where's the justice being taken pride by the system in their statements? The fact that they afforded to make laws and decrees, proclamations and letters of instructions, these can be watered down by the same system whose motive is to appease with their own greed-driven motives. Did red tape being cut off? Nope, did Smuggling being curbed? Not as well, the unjust competition brought by unbridled neoliberalism forced domestic companies into brink of bankruptcy while the system's own continues to gain much profit from its unpopular motives. Millions continued to be unemployed if not having their jobs endangered by policies favoring the system on the pretense of modernisation and development such as contractualisation and retrenchment.
How is agriculture? Did it provide meaningful employment? Nope, not even modernisation as promised by the system's own "agrarian reform program" that actually benefits themselves and not of the farmers the said program tries to speak for. Much more that there is no actual modernisation in agriculture after seeing hundreds of machete wielding farmworkers harvesting sugar for a lowest wage of 9.50 pesos in Haceinda Luisita, as well as communities that are in need of sufficient support by the government.
If there is, then it is not for the farmers nor the communities, but the system themselves trying to make profits in their corruption, of their cash crops at the expense of the masses' own labour.
Well, no wonder why amidst these braggings everyone concerned sees is migration to other countries as guest workers encountering various dangers and swindles, if not forced contentment as semiemployed workers that is, different from their respective professions.
And not even wonder why these clear and present tensions and problems justify protests this May Day.