Manila – The Institute for Labor Studies’ (ILS) Workers Welfare Research Division has three on going researches that will be released by year end highlighting three pressing issues concerning Filipino workers across the nation.
These topics include policy papers on Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), mental health, and ILO Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190).
BIG tackles an old idea for universal provision of a minimum decent income, contextualized within the Covid-19 crisis that as you know has affected several aspects of people’s lives and accelerated certain shifts in our societies. Given the lack of coverage on the topic as well as the overall complexity of the nuances involved in investigating it, the study builds mostly on theoretical underpinnings and arguments behind the idea. Initial results from data gathering were already presented during the ILS webinar titled “Pursuit of a Just Society: Introducing Wage Subsidies and Basic Income Guarantees in the Philippines held last October 14, 2020.
On Mental Health, the paper addresses questions about how workplaces responded to the huge mental health challenge exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis. It is based mainly on an establishment survey in the IT-BPO industry in selected sites including Metro Manila, Cebu and Cagayan de Oro, which was done online via Microsoft Forms. Key dimensions explored in the study were policy institutionalization, private/public financing, policy intersectionality (relationship of MH with other social and labor policies), and structural constraints (as a decolonial approach both to the subject and to the methodology). Preliminary results were also introduced in the sixth ILS webinar titled “Between Resilience & Transformation: Understanding ‘workers-powered’ mental health care held last October 8, 2020. The research team is currently post-processing the data while conducting Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) and Focused Group Discussions (FGDs) with an 80-90%.response rate.
On the other hand, the ILO Convention 190 is a gap analysis on the Violence and Harassment in the World of Work Convention (and, by extension, the Recommendation 206). It is basically part of the much-needed preparatory work as the Philippines seeks to ratify the instrument following its adoption last year. As a form of assessing the extent to which the country’s policy-regulatory environment adheres to the provisions of C190, reviews were conducted of existing laws, policies as well as practices related to the subject of the instrument. Complementing such exercise are results of FGDs and consultation-workshops with tripartite stakeholders together with other civil society partners. Key results were discussed during the 9th ILS Revive and Thrive webinar titled “More than rhetoric: Policy directions toward a world of work free from violence and harassment held last November 19, 2020.
To view the webinars cited, click this link: http://ils.dole.gov.ph/revive-and-thrive-covid-19-webinar-series/