Another chance, perhaps?

In the last presidential forum aired by the ABS-CBN News Channel last Friday afternoon (I do not know if it was a replay or not), three of the more talented aspirants showed up. They were, in alphabetical order, Sen. Richard Gordon, former Sec. Gilberto Teodoro and Sen. Manuel Villar. I lamented that I only witnessed a portion of the program or I could have formed a better opinion on the frame of mind of whoever may be elected to the presidency this May 2010.

The question that, I thought, attempted to ferret out the more fundamental thrust of the candidates was on economics. What would they do, if elected president, to attract foreign investors to our country? Raised by a gentleman from the European Chamber of Commerce, he claimed that the Philippines ranked very low in the list of Asian destinations of foreign funds. He, perhaps with a tinge of sadness, even opined that Cambodia, a country believed to be among the region's less economically flourishing nations, is about to overtake us in that list.

It was a difficult question. The respondents, for a reason that I imagined was reasonably grounded on political reality, did not make my grade.

If we were to listen to the sighs of Cebuano furniture exporters, we would hear their complains about low labor costs in China as their main source of problem. And this is not new. This concern has been going the last few decades.

In the late seventies to the early eighties, we exported the finest of rattan furniture products. Cebu made rattan chairs and other crafts were unbeatable products sold in American shops. Then, Indonesia, which had the inexhaustible source of rattan, started hiring our expert craftsmen luring them with attractive pay scales. The apparent objective was to transfer the skills of our men to their own. At the end of the Filipino workers' contracts, when Indonesian workers got the feel of how to make quality rattan furniture, our countrymen were sent home. Indonesian labor took over at salary rates reportedly lower to our minimum pay. So, the supply problem and high production cost stymied our earlier international domination in the rattan furniture.

In the case of our wood and stone crafts, the story is somewhat repeated. We can her from our producers that their output, despite intellectual property protections, are practically copied (with slight modifications to avoid legal actions) and mass produced by competitors based in China. We can hardly compete because, again, the labor component there is lower to ours and as a result, our production costs are higher.

When such a large transnational corporation as the General Motors opted to put up their plant in Thailand few years ago, among the major factors they considered was workers' wage. We were supposed to be the other country considered for such international operations for the reason that we had a good corps of workers but the wage issue did us apparently in.

    A large Japanese electronics corporation operating at the Mactan Export Processing Zone closed doors last December and shut our few thousand Filipino employees. Their reason? They had to move to a country where labor cost would mean huge production savings because inversely, that would add to their profit margin.

If we were to revisit these examples honestly, we could be convinced that in order to attract foreign investments, we had to overhaul our labor laws. The minimum wage system has to be reviewed. And I was hoping that the presidential candidates in that forum I saw last Friday would have talked about this in their response to the question.

However, doing that would risk the ire of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our wage earners who were viewing the show. While a thorough explanation would somehow assuage initial apprehensions, there would not be enough time to do so in that forum. But, just the same, a statement or so would have given us the hint of somebody seriously thinking of grappling the bull by its horns. And that, to me, would have been a sufficient beginning. As it did not come to pass, I will have to wait for another such chance.