By Dominique Gabriel G. Bañaga

A local labor rights group is seeing a “bleak” outlook for 2023 due to the country’s high inflation rate.

Wennie Sancho, secretary-general of the General Alliance of Workers Association, said that based on their year-end report, the last quarter of the year was met with a “great bang” by the skyrocketing eight percent inflation rate against the economy’s backdrop that had barely recovered from the pandemic.

Sancho said the result of the high inflation rate is the unprecedented increase in the general prices of goods and services, followed by the deterioration of the workers’ purchasing power.

He said they are seeing a slow economic growth in 2023, and warned that the country is at the point of an economic stagnation as consumer confidence continues to drop.

Wages are failing to keep pace with inflation and it is causing a strain for households, he added.

The country’s food security is also in danger and with the government’s policy of “import liberalization scheme,” it is negatively impacting locally produced products, as well as workers in the agricultural sector, the group’s secretary-general said.

The group also slammed the excessive and exorbitant power rates of the Central Negros Electric Cooperative, pointing out it is grossly mismanaged, and even blamed its executives for “incompetent contracting” which resulted in the power cooperative’s current financial burden, they said.

Sancho said they are still hoping that the issues will be rectified by the government, and this will be a challenge to test every Filipino worker’s resiliency in the coming years.

“In general, while there are fewer workers really seeing their quality of life improving, they are still hoping that they will survive as they had survived in the past,” he said./DGB, WDJ