A plea for help

Last week’s newspapers announced yet another increase in the price of gasoline, which has fueled (pun intended) yet another increase in the prices of almost all goods and services. For example, a shipping line recently announced an increase in their tariff. This increase will ultimately result in even higher prices for goods and services locally. We all know about CUC’s surcharge. This, too, came as a result of high fuel costs (and unpaid electric bills of government offices but that’s another story). And if you have been to the stores recently, you would have noticed that grocers are charging higher prices than before. Where will it all end? And when?

That prices are high and climbing is no longer news to the people who are straining their necks to find signs of relief, relief that will probably be slow in coming, if ever, given the precarious economic situation we find ourselves in. For example, can business afford to raise wages at a time when business income and revenues are visibly on the decline? Most likely not.

It has always been difficult for local hires working in the private sector to ask for a wage increase because they represent a minority in the private sector work force and so there has always been a tendency on the part of these workers to look toward the government for assistance in this area. After all, if government can proffer one legislation after another to benefit guest workers, then surely government can do the same for its own people. Three times already, the local government has tried to pass legislation to provide relief to resident workers in the private sector in the form of higher wages and in so doing level the playing field for all workers and put an end to the double standard that has often characterized the way employers have treated their local workers versus contract workers, with the law having legislated more for contract workers than it has for local workers. Yet all three attempts failed because of flaws that they supposedly contained and for poor timing.

Human resource managers around the island will probably agree with me that leveling the playing field will render the task of policy making far easier and, well, far fairer for all workers, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, age, sex, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, marital status, military status, disability, etc. For example, some businesses require a doctor’s slip of their employees when they have missed three or more days of work. Yet in the same breath, the same businesses will pay for the medical expense of its nonresident worker while looking the other way when it comes to their resident worker all because the law says so. Fair?

Local workers would like to think that out of the three efforts thus far to raise wages and bring some dignity to the workplace has arisen a phoenix, the general consensus and awareness among business and government leaders about the wrong that afflicts resident workers daily. Perhaps from this consensus something can finally be done to help workers struggling to make it with their low wages.

The local workforce makes up a mere 20 percent of most island employers. How much more would it cost employers to extend similar benefits to their local employees in the name of fairness and in the name of good, sound, and sustainable business practices and leadership?

Joe Asanuma
Tanapag, Saipan