CWR | Center for Women's Resources

The Center for Women’s Resources (CWR) asserted that the World Bank’s reclassification of the Philippines as an upper middle-income country (UMIC) should not be interpreted as proof that the lives of Filipino women have substantially improved.  

According to CWR, the World Bank’s income classification is based primarily on gross national income (GNI) per capita—an average income measure that fails to capture income inequality, poverty, labor conditions, or women’s economic realities. 

CWR contends that despite the country’s higher income classification, millions of Filipino women continue to face low wages, insecure and informal employment, rising living costs, and limited access to quality public services. The organization argues that the designation creates an illusion of development while overlooking the structural inequalities that persist in Philippine society. 

“The problem with relying on an average income measure is that averages conceal inequality,” CWR Executive Director Cham Peres explained. “The enormous wealth accumulated by a handful of billionaires raises the country’s average income, but this does not mean that ordinary workers are earning more or living better.” 

Perez noted that the disparity between the country’s wealthiest individuals and ordinary workers illustrates the limitations of income-based classifications. While billionaires like Enrique Razon and Ramon Ang have amassed fortunes worth billions of dollars, millions of Filipino workers continue to survive on wages that barely cover the cost of daily necessities. A minimum wage earner in Metro Manila receiving ₱695 a day remains worlds apart from the country’s wealthiest business elites, yet both are reflected in the same national average used to determine the country’s income classification. 

CWR said this disconnect is reflected across multiple social and economic indicators. 

Women’s labor force participation remains only 52.3% compared with 75.2% for men, indicating that millions of women continue to face barriers to paid employment. Among those who are employed, many remain concentrated in low-paying and precarious occupations, including domestic work, vending, home-based work, gig work, and export-oriented manufacturing, where contractualization, low wages, and limited social protection remain widespread.

CWR estimates that well over 20 million Filipino women continue to experience economic insecurity because of insufficient income, unstable employment, lack of livelihood opportunities, or exclusion from paid work due to caregiving responsibilities. 

CWR also questioned the government’s employment statistics, noting that anyone who worked for at least an hour during the reference week is officially counted as employed. While employment rates may appear favorable on paper, they often conceal the realities of underemployment, irregular work, and wages that remain insufficient to meet a family’s basic needs. 

“The real condition of workers cannot be measured simply by employment figures,” Perez said. “Having a job does not mean having a decent livelihood. Millions of Filipinos are working but remain poor because their wages are too low, their jobs are insecure, or they cannot find enough hours of work.”

These realities are reflected in people’s own assessment of their living conditions. The January 2026 Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showed that 51% of Filipino families, or an estimated 14.3 million households, consider themselves poor, a clear indication of the discrepancy between macroeconomic indicators and people’s lived experiences.

Women also continue to face persistent wage inequality. The gender wage gap is largest in occupations where women are highly concentrated, at 26.2% for service and sales workers and 29.4% for workers in elementary occupations, demonstrating how occupational segregation continues to depress women’s earnings.

These conditions are rooted in decades of neoliberal policies that prioritize foreign investment, trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization over building domestic industries and modernizing agriculture, according to CWR. The organization noted that the same international financial institutions that now classify the Philippines as an upper middle-income country have long promoted these policies through development lending and policy prescriptions.

“Instead of building a strong domestic industrial base and a productive agricultural sector, these policies have encouraged greater dependence on foreign investment, imports, labor export, and cheap Filipino labor,” Perez said. “The result has been an economy that generates wealth for corporations and a small elite while leaving millions of workers – especially women – in precarious employment, low-paying jobs, and economic insecurity.”

Perez also warned that the country’s upgraded income status comes amid a growing public debt burden. Outstanding national government debt reached ₱17.71 trillion by the end of 2025 and is projected to approach ₱19 trillion by the end of 2026. This year alone, approximately ₱950 billion will be spent on debt servicing – resources that could otherwise be invested in health care, education, childcare, housing, and social protection.

CWR further cautioned that, as an upper middle-income country, the Philippines may gradually lose access to concessional financing, potentially increasing borrowing costs without addressing the structural causes of poverty and inequality. 

“Development cannot be measured simply by crossing an income threshold,” Perez said. “The real question is whether economic growth has translated into secure livelihoods, living wages, affordable food, quality education, accessible health care, and a life of dignity for Filipino women and their families.”

Rather than celebrating a statistical milestone, CWR called on the Marcos Jr. administration to pursue a development strategy anchored in national industrialization, genuine agrarian reform, living wages, strengthened labor rights, universal social protection, expanded public care services, and gender-responsive public investments. The organization also urged the government to adopt a more progressive fiscal system that ensures those with the greatest wealth contribute a greater share toward financing public services.

“Women should not be asked to measure progress through economic statistics that fail to reflect their everyday realities,” Perez concluded. “Real development occurs only when women are free from poverty, have decent and secure jobs, receive equal pay for equal work, and enjoy access to quality public services.”

The recent school shooting in Tacloban, Leyte, is a tragedy that demands accountability – not from children, but from a government that has long neglected the needs of Filipino youth. Rather than being treated as an isolated incident, this tragedy exposes deep systemic failures that continue to place young people at risk. 

Millions of Filipinos lack access to quality education, while our schools continue to suffer from chronic shortages of classrooms, facilities, guidance counselors, and mental health services. Nearly 5 million youth are out of school and more than 24 million Filipinos are not functionally literate. Yet instead of addressing these long-standing problems, the government’s response remains one of neglect, underfunding, and punitive policies. 

We reject any attempt to exploit this tragedy to justify harsher punishments against children. The real crisis is not a lack of criminalization, but the state’s failure to fulfill its responsibility to provide quality education, accessible mental health care, social protection, and meaningful opportunities for young people.

Likewise, proposals to lower the age of criminal responsibility will neither address the root causes of violence nor prevent similar tragedies from happening again. Nor will deploying more police in schools make students safer.  Schools should be spaces of learning, growth, critical thinking, and care — not environments defined by surveillance, fear, and militarization. Accountability must also be demanded from adults entrusted with firearms. The weapons used in this incident belonged to adult gun owners, and responsibility cannot be shifted solely onto the minors. 

Without addressing poverty, inadequate access to mental health services, and the social exclusion experienced by many young people, punitive measures and increased militarization will only exacerbate feelings of alienation and despair. Focusing on criminalizing children also diverts attention from those who bear the greater responsibility for ensuring safe and supportive learning environments: governments, communities, and adults entrusted with the welfare of children. True prevention requires a holistic approach that centers on social justice, equity,  and empowerment of the youth. 

What students truly need are guidance counselors, mental health professionals, social workers, effective child protection mechanisms, libraries, and adequate school facilities that nurture their well-being and development.

Children need guidance, care, and opportunities – not fear and punishment. Schools need adequate funding, qualified counselors, libraries, and safe learning environments. Communities need decent jobs, accessible social services, and hope for the future.

Safe schools are built through education, care,  and social justice — not through fear, militarization, and criminalization.

The fight for safe schools is inseparable from the fight for a genuinely accessible, inclusive, and people-oriented education system.

As we commemorate International Workers’ Day 2026, the Center for Women’s Resources (CWR) honors all working people of the world, especially in the Philippines, whose hands and labor generate the world’s wealth, yet remain the most undervalued and exploited. The working people sustain our economies and communities, yet the current global capitalist system keeps their rights, welfare, and conditions precarious.

Workers in the Philippines face a worsening labor landscape marked by meager wages that barely meet basic needs, persistent job insecurity, intensified labor flexibilization, and worsening safety and working conditions. Labor flexibilization traps workers in unstable, low-paying and limited access to benefits and social protection. This deepens job insecurity and weakens the workers’ rights to unionize,  a critical means of  advancing workers’ rights. 

Restrictive and unjust labor policies further undermine basic workers’ rights. In 2025, the Philippines was listed among the 10 worst countries for workers due to its systematic violation of labor rights, which include red-tagging, threats and intimidation, violent dispersal of strikes, and extrajudicial killings.

Women workers are often disproportionately affected by these conditions, as they are often placed in low-paid, irregular, and unprotected jobs. Amid rising living costs and multiple burdens, women, particularly from marginalized sectors, bear the brunt of insufficient wages, pushing them further into economic vulnerability. Based on CWR interviews,  there is a persistent pattern of women resorting to extreme measures, such as skipping meals and reducing food intake, just to ensure their families survive. 

These conditions make the workers and peoples’ demand to raise the minimum wage across the regions to the family living wage of ₱1,200.00 and removal of the value-added tax (VAT) and excise tax on oil and other basic commodities. Alongside this is the demand to respect and uphold workers’ fundamental right to freedom of association, and ultimately to junk neoliberal policies and programs that have, for decades, been detrimental to the lives of the Filipino people. 

Now more than ever, CWR reaffirms its commitment to working towards a society where every worker is protected, empowered, and dignified. It holds firm that only through collective struggle can these goals be achieved. We call on everyone to stand with working people in the fight for better working and living conditions. Workers of the world, unite! #