on "Effects of minimum wage on the Philippine economy"

by Art Ang

The different effects of minimum wage on the Philippine economy and it's corresponding advantages and disadvantages.

The Labor Code was passed mainly for the protection of the workers. There are 3 main parts of the Labor Code mainly prohibition of the termination of private employees, recognition of employees' right to form a trade union expressly, and allow employees to strike as long as they abide by the rules.

Reports by Leonardo A. Lanzona, Jr. indicated that the number of mid-range salary earners have decreased while the ones with high-range salaries have increased. This suggests that employers prefer the higher-skilled higher-earning workers which can result to even greater unemployment in our country.

Another study shows that small industries tend to pay lower salaries than most bigger industries since majority of the bigger industries' workers are contractual(means that these workers would only work for a discussed number of days and would be replace by a new set of workers). 

This shows that employees prefer the small industries since they provide assurance of work though the salaries are minimal or below average. The bad thing about this is that because of this mentality, small industries find it hard to succeed or progress into being a big industry since their workers are mostly low or below average skilled while big industries continue to build themselves.

These big industries would drive small industries to losses that would ultimately lead them to shut down. This means that their employees would have no other choice but to find different jobs but based on their skills, they would only lead to low-salary professions which these big industries could use to their advantage.

The small industries would be left to hiring young, inexperience, and female workers to minimize expenses. The Labor Code is still here but does it still perform its purpose and that is to protect and benefit workers?