I don't agree, because your argument is based on false premises. You make it sound like workers have no choice but to be workers, when in reality many workers rise to the top and become CEOs, some people are self-employed (Doctors, lawyers, etc) and still others are workers who decided to establish their own business. It is also based on the very dangerous false presumption, that demanding and being given higher wages is automatically a win for the worker (I will explain later why this is wrong.)
Next, there is an ideology in your argument lifted out of the book of the communists, the one that implies business owners are lazy and that their workers are doing all the work. The only people who say such things, in my opinion, are people who have never started their own business, but want to bring down other people down to their level. If it's that easy, may I ask what it is that's stopping you from starting your own business? If it's as simple as your story goes, why wouldn't everyone want to be Juan and make money out of other people's work? The reason is that everyone wants to be Juan, but most people have the mentality and intelligence of Pedro. It takes an intelligent, hard-working individual gifted with vision and luck to become a successful businessman, contrary to the presumption that he is merely a parasite, the reality is most Juans are benevolent beings who bestow employment to people like Pedro who otherwise would be doing nothing but sitting on their *** wondering what to do or drinking all day and beating up their wife
Now I will explain why getting high wages is only a very temporary improvement in the life of a worker, with permanent risks to his wellbeing. When you receive a wage increase, it automatically increases the business risk of the investors/owners, this means the owners are much more likely to fire employees after a wage increase, and investors are much more likely to slow or halt investment when wages increase. It's simple, they are going to be paying more for more or less the same productivity, and that increases business risk. In other countries with minimum wage, they always match the wage to the productivity of the workers. If they are more productive, the wage goes up. It is not necessarily tied to inflation, but often is because inflation increases as a country becomes more productive.
In the Philippines however, wages are increased without regard to productivity, and as a result we have had massive high inflationary periods in the past and continue to suffer from relatively high inflation even today. This inflation erodes the buying power of everyone, workers included. The very thing you are complaining, the prices of goods going up, is ironically caused by the thing you are demanding, higher wages. As a result you enter into a vicious cycle where wages keep going up, but inflation in response, also spikes up higher and higher. This makes everyone poor, but the worse thing is it makes businessmen poor, and as much as that might make you happy to see businessmen suffer, know that in the end it is going to be the employees who will ultimately suffer the most as businesses collapse and employment opportunities dry up.
When I say we are the most expensive country in Asia to invest in, in terms of minimum wage, that has nothing to do with being paid the highest salary. It has to do with the wage commensurate to productivity and the price of goods. We are not poor because we are paid a small salary, we are poor because goods are extremely expensive due to explosive inflation both past and present. And funny enough, this inflation was caused by high minimum wages. If you still fail to put two and two together, do you ever wonder why a country like Singapore which was 10x poorer than the Philippines is in the 1960's is now one of the richest countries in Asia despite not having a minimum wage for most of its history?
Don't blame the businessmen, blame yourself. Get better educated, acquire new skills and through hard work and determination you can improve yourself rather than demand the government fix your problems for you (which they never can and never do anyway)...
Moral of your story that you missed is this: If Juan wasn't around, what would Pedro have done? He wouldn't have come up with the idea on his own, since he clearly lacks intelligence and vision needed to make a business enterprise succeed... without Juan, Pedro would have surely starved to death and in the same manner, a country without businessmen will slowly starve to death. If you don't believe me, go to North Korea and see for yourself
OT: Regarding the prostitute comparison, I think you're wrong here as well. Most prostitutes are either self-employed or they are in partnership with their bugaw. You might look down on prostitutes but many of them earn more in a day than most ordinary workers earn in a month. =P








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though cost of living in cebu is not that high compare to Manila.
