Job security is a myth

Typical May Day rally in Manila, Philippines wanting for minimum wage increase, abolition of contractualization, security of tenure, and many more.

Today we are commemorating the contributions of our workers in developing on what we have right now, I mean today is the May Day. The workers are one of the backbones of the modern and industrialized civilization that has been in place since 19th century. Without them, it would have been impossible for businesses to flourish, impossible for a consumer society to emerge, and most of all, it would have been impossible for democracy to emerge today because they are the one buffers the elites from taking advantage those who are in the lower strata of our society, including the working class.

However, the emergence of automated technology gives a competition to manual labor where producing goods can be done in a massive scale in a short span of time through machines, thus rendering some tasks impractical to manual labor. Businesses or even the government, to lessen the enormous labor costs, prefer to hire workers not directly, but through contractual agencies hired by private businesses or by the government agencies. These changes cannot be grasped by many employees especially who are receiving wages barely in line with the minimum wage or have lesser skills to be utilized with the increasing automated and information-based economy of today.

For the celebration of May Day, I think workers should grasp the reality that contractualization is not their enemy, but as a motivation for them to learn how to adopt with the changing technologies and act like an entrepreneur, where they can generate their own capital through using the greatest invention of humankind, the internet. Contractualization is not their enemy, but hamstring government regulations that stiff job creation to pander few local business elites like the forced 60/40 equity sharing in favor of Filipino businesses, high and unnecessary tax charges on businesses and workers, massive red tape in the government, and dilapidated infrastructures.