Labor Secretary Marianito Roque has ordered regional wage boards to fast track the decisions on wage petitions filed all over the country. Roque, in a media interview at the Jobs Fair organized by the Department of Labor and Employment for Labor Day at SMX Mall of Asia, said no decisions have been made yet on the wage petitions. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who opened the fair, directed him to act on the wage hike requests immediately, Roque said. “We will have to order the regional wage boards to speed up the process of wage determination,” he said. Roque noted that the opposition to a wage hike has been more intense in 2010 compared to that in 2009. Employers, he said, disapproved of the wage increase because they were still recovering from the effects of the global recession. “The position of ECOP is that it is not timely because they just came back from the crisis. Our job is to blend the two opposing positions,” the DOLE chief noted. In Mindanao, employers there have asked for a wage hike moratorium due to the power crisis that reduced their productivity.
