1.

Research Title: National Minimum Wage: Through the Eyes of Minimum

Wage Earners in Iloilo City

2. Proponents
a) Name: JV Corillo, Danny Dy Quioyo and Mario Miguel Perez

b) Major Field(s) of Interest: Political Science, Social Science and History.

c) Address: Sambag, Jaro, Iloilo City / Sibalom, Antique / Roxas City,

Capiz

d) Email and Contact Number: 09555405211 / 09978677275 /

09489644104

3. Key Words: National Minimum Wage, Minimum Wage Earners, Train Law

4. Objectives:
a) What makes a minimum wage earner?

b) What are the goals of a National Minimum Wage in the Philippines?

c) How will the National Minimum Wage relieve minimum wage earners
from further financial burden?

d) How would an ordinary Ilonggo minimum wage earner live off a day’s
wage compared to other minimum wages from various regions?

e) How would the National Minimum Wage adapt to future supervening

events in the Philippine economy?

5. Expected Output:

6. Background:
After President Duterte ordered the wage boards to convene, labor
groups yesterday pushed for the adoption of a national minimum wage and
the grant of P500 subsidy to minimum wage earners. “President Duterte
should amend his order to explicitly ask (for) a substantial salary hike as a
relief measure and direct the wage boards to raise minimum wages to a
national level,” Partido ng Manggagawa chair Renato Magtubo said in a
statement. He said the various wage boards must decisively base the
determination of minimum wages on the cost of living and the living wage
criteria, not on the capacity of employers to pay. Based on records, the
increase in minimum wage rates granted by the regional wage boards does
not exceed P1,000 per month – way below the additional burden of expenses
incurred by low income earners to date brought about by rising inflation,
according to Magtubo.

The Associated Labor Union (ALU) yesterday expressed its full

cooperation for the wage boards to convene and grant the much-needed
wage adjustments for workers nationwide. ALU vice president Gerard Seno
said they have already received notices from the wage boards and their
representatives will attend the wage board meetings. The group is seeking an
P800 across-the-board increase in the daily pay of all minimum wage earners
nationwide.

“The wages should now be uniform rate because the poverty in Luzon is
the same poverty felt by workers in the Visayas and Mindanao. The prices of
commodities are the same in every region so the salary should also be
uniform,” ALU spokesman Alan Tanjusay said (Jaymalin M., 2018).

7. Review of Literature:

Where the Minimum Wage Bites Hard: Introduction of Minimum Wages to a

Low Wage Sector

Between 1993 and April 1999 there was no minimum wage in the United
Kingdom (except in agriculture). In this paper we study the effects of the
introduction of a National Minimum Wage (NMW) in April 1999 on one heavily
affected sector, the residential care homes industry. This sector contains a
large number of low paid workers and as such can be viewed as being very
vulnerable to minimum wage legislation. We look at the impact on both
wages and employment. Our results suggest that the minimum wage raised
the wages of a large number of care home workers, causing a very big wage
compression of the lower end of the wage distribution, thereby strongly
reducing wage inequality. There is some evidence of employment and hours
reductions after the minimum wage introduction, though the estimated
effects are not that sizable given how heavily the wage structure was
affected.
(Machin S., Manning A., Rahman L., 2003)
THE ECONOMICS OF MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION REVISITED
In his seminal article “The Economics ofMinimum WageLegislation” (1946)
George Stigler used what are now standard resource
misallocationandlossofemployment argumentsto criticize the minimum wage.
He wrote (1946: 358):
The minimum wage provisions ofthe Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
have been repealed by inflation. Many voices are now taking up the cry for a
higher minimum. ... The popular objective of minimum wage legislation—the
elimination ofextreme poverty— is not seriously debatable. The important
questions are rather: (1) Does such legislation diminish poverty? (2) Are there
efficient alternatives? ...Some readers will probably know my answers already
(“no” and “yes,” respectively); it is distressing how often one can guess the
answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.
Over four decades of empirical studies leave no doubt that increases in
the minimum wage do reduce employment to some extent. 1 Yet by most
counts, the number of lost jobs is trivial in the aggregate. Only for teenagers
are statistically significant negative effects on employment consistently
observed.
(Burkhauser V.R. and Finegan T.A.)

8. Work Plan: