Alexander B.

Bonifacio III 12 - ABM

Poverty in the Philippines

Poverty is when a person doesn’t have the sufficient funds to obtain their basic needs.
There are a lot of people who currently live under poverty and the Philippines has a big chunk of
people. About 18.1% of Filipinos, roughly 19.9 million people, earn less than PHP 12,030 per
month (https://psa.gov.ph/poverty-press-releases/nid/167972). This makes it really hard to pay
for all your needs. Even after all these years, the government has yet to find a solution to this
problem.

Majority of the people earning minimum wage are blue collar workers. A lot of Filipinos
usually work in these kinds of jobs because they don’t require a high educational attainment.
These people aren’t able to get quality education because their parents can’t afford to do so.
The poor stay poor because they don’t have the same number of opportunities, if any at all, the
more wealthy people have. This causes people to sometimes not perform their absolute best in
their job since they know that there is a low chance of them getting a promotion. Lack of
motivation makes people perform worse which in turn makes the opportunities granted to them
lower. Even the smallest of chances could make you boom.

Humans are the only species who have the concept of money. Obtaining what we need
to survive is usually through the exchange of goods for cash. To earn this, people work. But
people need motivation to work and succeed. Motivation to get a higher paying job to enjoy
recreational activities. This is hard to come by when you are working an entry level job since
you will probably be working there forever.

One of the best ways of earning a high paying job is to have a good educational
background which usually comes behind a massive pay wall. The other way is through
experience, which is hard to get if you can only land entry level jobs that don’t pay well. It’s
really hard to escape the poverty line if you are born within it. Since it’s a domino effect, being
poor means your education would be lacking and having bad education would mean you would
also have a job that doesn’t pay well. Lack of affordable/free quality education and the minimum
wage being so low are really the big reasons as to why a lot of people are affected by poverty.

You really have to be lucky to escape from poverty in our current time. The amount of
things that have to go right in order to succeed are too many to count. Minimum wage should be
able to accommodate all your basic needs without any worry, which are the bare minimum.
Raising the minimum wage would be a big help to all the blue collar workers. Having better free
education would also make people more productive and would make our society run smoother.
But alas these are not met and a lot of people suffer in poverty because of it.