SM Prime Holdings, Inc. announced that the annual meeting of its stockholders will be conducted virtually on June 15, 2020 at 2:30pm. For more details please visit https://www.smprime.com/
Here’s a quick glance at how PSEi stocks fared on Friday, May 15, 2020.
By Marjorie Muyrong and Jerik Cruz
WHAT SHOULD our COVID-19 “new normal” look like? As economic stimulus bills for the pandemic are now being debated in Congress, questions on how the Philippine economy will be transformed in the coming months are asked. The shape of the country’s long-term development goals, as expressed in AmBisyon Natin 2040, is also uncertain.
These discussions should not be left only to policymakers. In the same spirit of bayanihan, all Filipinos have a role to play in defining this new normal for their communities and sectors. And we must also keep in mind that envisioning a post-COVID-19 future need not be an exercise in fear — but of solidarity in addressing long-running imbalances in the economy.
THE HEALTH IMPERATIVE
There is no doubt that community quarantines have succeeded in buying time for hospitals to meet the first surge in COVID-19 patients. According to Dr. Jarylle Chu, a training fellow at Makati Medical Center, “The next challenge is to pool funds for the future acquisition of the vaccine and to organize a fast country-wide vaccination plan early on.”
Yet in a real sense, COVID-19 has laid bare the vulnerabilities of the Philippine health system. As a country with one of the lowest per capita health expenditures among the ASEAN-5, addressing the pandemic in the long term demands that we not only pour resources for mass testing, treatment, and vaccines; for expanding production for COVID-19-related supplies in the garments and pharmaceuticals sectors; but that we also invest to enhance the effectiveness and accessibility of our public health services.
There is ample indication that such a “COVID-19 Keynesianism” strategy can also be a pillar of a long-term recovery plan. Our estimates using Input-Output analysis suggest that investing P1 billion in the health sector can support as many as 16,000 jobs. The same amount can also catalyze up to 7,000 jobs in the pharmaceuticals sector, or 19,000 jobs in the garments sector.
SUPPORT MSME ‘RETROFITTING’
With government’s social amelioration efforts still facing serial hurdles, numerous small business owners have stepped in to assist their workers, even when that means depleting their cash reserves.
“Fight to stay in business… Keep yourself and the company afloat so that you can continue to help others,” advises one business owner in Metro Manila. Indeed, we hear many anecdotes of entrepreneurs retrofitting their business, oftentimes by leveraging digital innovations, to keep themselves liquid and continue paying their employees.
But to support these efforts, assistance must not be limited to wage subsidies and “bounce back” loans; it should also include support to ensure these repurposing initiatives’ sustainability. Beyond capital and training support, investments to strengthen the country’s logistics and digital infrastructure, especially outside of Metro Manila, can expand opportunities for continued business operations during the pandemic.
REBALANCING TOWARDS AGRICULTURE
COVID-19 makes a revival of agriculture a national imperative — not only to maintain food supply in a disrupted trade environment, but to rebalance the Philippines’ Manila-centric economy, and to absorb displaced workers. In fact, in our Input-Output analyses, we find that agricultural sectors consistently have the most promising job-creating prospects, led by the “other crops” (23,500 jobs per P1-billion investment), “fisheries” (20,050), “sugar” (18,800), “corn” (14,670), and “coconut” (14,300) subsectors.
But the challenge will not be resolved simply by calling people to farm again. “Ang sinusulong nila ngayon, Balik Probinsya Program. Magbabalik-probinsya ka nga, pero pagdating naman doon sa probinsya, wala namang kabuhayan doon,” explains Gary Perlado of the Rice Watch Action Network (“The proposal they have now is the Balik Probinsya Program. But if people go back to the provinces, there are no jobs there”). Due to decades of neglect and misgovernance, farming and fisheries have been linked with high poverty levels nationwide.
And the sector has again been a victim of recent lockdown policies. Vegetable farmers, to take one example, have reportedly been unable to access needed farm inputs and sell their goods, because of restrictions that have been imposed during community quarantines. This has worsened their indebtedness.
Reinvigorating agriculture amidst the COVID-19 pandemic will require a dedicated public investment program on top of other policy changes. For example, investments are sorely needed in improving rural infrastructure; facilitating a shift to higher-productivity agribusiness; enhancing marketing and distribution systems; and addressing other long-standing problems in the rural economy, such as access to land and credit. These are hardly new issues, though the pandemic has made resolving them all the more pressing.
Even as COVID-19 hangs over us, Filipinos must confront the new normal, not only with clarity of mind, but also with solidarity. Despite its toll, the pandemic offers us an opportunity to reimagine the contours of our economies, communities, and workplaces, and to respond decisively to structural infirmities within them.
The spirit of bayanihan has been well and alive in donation drives for food aid and COVID-19 supplies — can it also be channeled to efforts to reorient our economy in a more resilient and inclusive direction?
As Dr. Jarylle Chu reminds us, “The real front-liners here are the people in the community.”
Marjorie Muyrong is a PhD Sociology student at La Trobe University. Jerik Cruz is an incoming PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a fellow of Action for Economic Reforms. Both are affiliated with the Ateneo de Manila University’s Department of Economics.
By Conor Sen
THERE ARE REASONS to be optimistic about corporate America getting more comfortable with work-from-home arrangements brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Workers gain more flexibility around their working and living arrangements. Both companies and workers stand to save money by relying less on high-cost real estate. If it results in no loss of productivity, what’s not to like?
But as we’ve seen with smartphone and social-media culture, what can start out as an exciting new way of doing things can have negative effects that may only become apparent after wide adoption and long-term use.
The most obvious one is a further encroachment of the workplace on home life. For many professionals in industries such as media, finance, and technology, this might not represent much of a change from the status quo. For other types of workers accustomed to a firmer divide between work and other activities, they might be in for a shock; what starts out as optional can quickly become obligatory. Teachers, for instance, are probably not in a hurry to agree to let parents and students request Zoom calls at any hour of the day, seven days a week.
If the ability to work from home becomes a requirement in the hiring process, it raises the question of what types of workers this might leave behind. When high-powered jobs require senior workers to relocate to New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, workers who are unwilling or unable to make such a move get left out. But a similar version of this filtering process might take place in the case of work-from-home requirements. Workers have largely organized their lives around the assumption that they would travel to and work in an office five days a week. If working from home becomes the norm, employees will be expected to have quiet private home-office space, a high-speed internet connection, secure file cabinets, a computer that is more capable than one needed for casual home use, a scanner and printer and office supplies. For some workers, that could be more of a burden than they faced under the office-work paradigm.
More troubling, removing geography as a constraint to employment might level the playing field between American and overseas workers, leading to a new wave of job outsourcing like that affecting manufacturing during the past two decades. A corporate culture that can seamlessly manage engineers working remotely in San Francisco, Austin, Texas, Omaha, Nebraska, and Richmond, Virginia, could presumably incorporate engineers working in Romania or India. What’s more, the adoption of remote work could be corporate America’s way to hedge against an intensifying political climate of nationalism and closed borders.
Within organizations there would likely be some employees who are made better off and others who are made worse off. People entering the workforce and starting new jobs have to learn not only new skills but also office decorum, culture, and interpersonal norms. A big part of that involves not just formal training but also observing coworkers and seeing how they act and think. Often, the best mentors are more experienced workers with whom you don’t work directly with or for, but who can offer insight and guidance without either person worrying about creating liabilities or conflicts. But it’s precisely those potential mentors — mainly older workers with experience and perhaps less room or desire for professional advancement — who may be the most tempted to work from home. Without their physical presence in the office, who will younger workers learn from, both formally and informally, and how will large, far-flung organizations establish or maintain any consistent kind of culture?
There’s also the question of increased legal liability. As many workplace scandals show, well-paid financial traders and corporate executives put inappropriate comments into e-mails and text messages all the time, even when they’ve been trained and told not to. How much more prevalent will these types of problems be if many more workers have even more of their workplace communications, which normally might be face-to-face but are now recorded on Slack, Zoom, and other collaboration tools in the less-formal home-office setting?
What we do know is that the initial effects of technology-enabled shifts are relatively easy to determine and predict. For example, in the case of Facebook, it started out as a place to see pictures of and keep up with friends and family. With a shift to work-from-home culture, it’s clear that the obvious advantages are increased flexibility and the potential for cost savings. It’s the secondary effects that can take years to tease out. In the case of Facebook, it was a whole host of issues, from data privacy to fake news to manipulative ads. Even if it’s not clear what those negative secondary effects will be from a broad shift to remote work, it’s inevitable that they’ll occur. What we need to do now is do our best to think them through and address the undesirable ones before they emerge.
BLOOMBERG OPINION
