Filipino Women’s State of the Nation Address
7/21/24
Marcos’ State of the Nation Address will only serve to continue his lies to make himself look good and take credit for a New Philippines or “Bagong Pilipinas.” Marcos will tout on how he has helped to slow inflation and open up opportunities for more work in the Philippines. But in reality these are only lies to confuse the Filipino people. Instead of genuinely supporting the working class and poor Filipinos, Marcos continues to cater to foreign countries and their corporations in attempts to appease the US imperialists, just like Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s administration in the 60s. There is no “Bagong Pilipinas” or “New Philippines,” it is the same old, rotten, and dying regime with a new mask.
Marcos will claim that he has helped create jobs and that the economy is improving, but his delusions are in stark contrast to reality. The average minimum wage is merely PHP442, only one-third of what is needed for a family wage (PHP1210). Marcos boasted about increasing wages but only gave a meager PHP35 wage increase, and only to private sector workers in the national capital region (NCR). The largest increase in jobs was in construction (745,000 to 5.1 million), but this is the third worst paid subsector with a daily wage of only PHP540. Whatever misleading, sugar-coated numbers and statistics that Marcos will share are just a veil over the truth: the only jobs increasing are to serve foreign corporations’ interests and not the Filipino people’s needs.
It is not a Bagong Pilipinas when hunger and poverty continues to increase in the Philippines. According to the National Nutrition Council, 1 out of 3 Filipino households experience food insecurity or lack of food. According to the Social Weather Stations, around 21.3 million families rated themselves as poor as of March 2024. This is the true people’s state of the nation: the people are hungry and impoverished. Marcos has done nothing to address these issues, and instead has only exacerbated them by prioritizing lavish, foreign travels to broker uneven trade deals and increase militarization of the Philippines. Marcos’ budget for state visits and travel expenses alone exceed P2.5 billion all at the expense of the Filipino people.
The economic crisis is exactly why Filipino women are forced to leave behind their families and migrate to foreign countries, around 6,400 Filipinos make the difficult decision to leave the country every day. In the US, Filipino women suffer from depressed wages, wage theft, legal vulnerability as migrants, mental health issues and blatant violence that threaten their life everyday. Amidst rising inflation in both the Philippines and the US, their wages do not go as far to support their families. Marcos touts that Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) are the “modern-day heroes” of the Philippines, but his budget for OFWs is only 1% (PHP2.8 billion) of what his budget is for war (PHP285.6 billion).
While Marcos plays into the hands of the US, expanding the presence and strength of US military presence in the Philippines, he willingly eggs on China’s aggression with no concern of the Filipino people who are caught in the middle. He has shown he is willing to sacrifice Filipino lives to appease his American puppet masters, but we, Filipino women, will not stand for this! GABRIELA USA vehemently condemns the Marcos Jr. regime for neglecting our people, creating a crisis where our families lives are treated as collateral damage, and risking our nation’s sovereignty for his own personal gain!