‘The DOLE cannot just promote local employment without vigorous industrialization and a healthy trade and commerce, and this, Laguesma understood as he promised to work with industries and the business community.’
THE incoming Marcos Jr. administration has made its intention known that it is keeping the labor sector close at heart because it is the first sector to complete its Cabinet-level appointees even before the actual proclamation of the presumptive president.
Both Bienvenido Laguesma and Susan “Toots” Ople, known leaders in the labor sector, accepted the offer of the Marcos camp to head the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and the newly established Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), respectively.
Laguesma and Ople are two of the best choices for the positions that they will assume. Laguesma served as DOLE secretary under then President Joseph Estrada, and also held various posts in government in other administrations.
Ople grew up breathing the labor air, she being a daughter of long-time labor secretary and senator Blas F. Ople, a pillar of the first Marcos administration. It was in fact during Ople’s time in the Department of Labor that the Philippines first entered and nurtured the labor exporting business to help the economy.
While Laguesma joined the business community after his stint in government, Toots Ople concentrated on helping overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) through her non-government organization, Blas F. Ople Policy Center and Training Institute.
This early, it is reassuring to hear the incoming labor secretary say that he wants to create a “workable formula” to balance the concerns of employers and workers and to address the joblessness in the country brought about by the ill effects of the coronavirus pandemic. He said he would push to spur local employment, even as he recognized the “social costs” of overseas employment, especially its impact on the Filipino family life.
“I would make my pitch for more employment… local employment. Because as I oversee overseas employment as providing us the needed foreign exchange remittances, I also look at the social costs that go with it – separation of family, too much dependence on foreign remittance, spending more than what you are actually earning and not saving for the future,” Laguesma said.
The DOLE cannot just promote local employment without vigorous industrialization and a healthy trade and commerce, and this, Laguesma understood as he promised to work with industries and the business community.
His aim is for Filipino workers to “have an option really of choosing to stay with their families, maybe not with very lucrative salaries, but enjoying and probably watching the growing up of their own children.”
Such a worthy objective, indeed, although we recognize the difficulties to make this happen.
