The world is a vampire… sent to drain
Secret destroyers… hold you up to the flames.
And what do I get for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game.- Smashing Pumpkins, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness*
There’s some joke I heard that people have quit tightening their belts because there’s no more leather to poke holes into. What makes the joke a bit on the sick side is that instead of tightening belts, some have tightened a noose around their necks. The morbidity of it all comes with the fact that you just don’t know if anyone’s doing this… literally or figuratively.
I really do not know how to begin, to continue, and end my thoughts for the day. It’s hard to articulate the thoughts of every person out there who, just in the past few weeks, probably got terminated. There are many euphemisms for a layoff: “redundancies,” “re-engineering,” “termination en masse,” or measures like freezing salaries or cutting down on working days. What stands between the worker and the road to ruin is that one lifeline that tethers people to have a sense of purpose in capitalist society: a job that pays a wage.
“The worst is yet to come,” says former Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno, and gives us the numbers: a 4.0 to 4.5 percent growth rate in 2008, and a 1.9 percent increase in exports growth from January to October 2008. I do not envy the almost-prophetic burden Professor Diokno has to carry in his presentation this afternoon at the University of the Philippines School of Economics; where he doesn’t warn of the impending storm, where he doesn’t bear news of a coming storm, but has to tell us all that the storm is here.
On Tuesday, the Department of Labor and Employment reports that 23, 485 Filipino workers, both here and abroad, have lost their jobs because of the economic crisis. Jay Julian, spokesman for DOLE, says that 19,443 workers have lost their jobs here, and 4,042 have lost their jobs abroad; a grand total of 23,485 jobs lost in just under three months. The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines – for all its failings – said that 2,933 of its members have been laid off, and 3,300 had their working hours cut or modified.
