ASIA BETTER BOOST QUALITY JOBS FOR GROWTH

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

From the ASEAN city-state of Singapore comes the challenge to Asia to boost quality jobs for growth.

Asia is indeed fortunate to have within it the most dynamic regions and emerging markets of the day, the same economies that are the growth drivers of the global economy. Yet paradoxically, Asia is also home to many countries where 40% of populations eke a living below the $2 poverty line yardstick for daily survival.

My country the Philippines, for instance, has seen rapid growth in the last decade that saw it graduate to middle income status. Its big investors have begun to scour for huge projects overseas, thus reinforcing overseas remittances that traditionally was fueled by overseas workers’ wages. Yet PH is manifesting a jobless growth, at the same time that its poverty incidence remains at a nauseatingly high rate of 33%.

Below is the update report from the Asian Development Bank about the need for quality jobs in Asia.

[Philippines, 12 September 2011]

Source: http://beta.adb.org/news/quality-jobs-essential-asias-growth-stability-report

Quality Jobs Essential to Asia's Growth, Stability - Report

23 Aug 2011

SINGAPORE – Asia’s policymakers must take decisive steps to generate high quality, productive jobs if the region is to sustain and broaden the benefits of its economic expansion of the past two decades, says an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report published today.

In a special chapter of Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2011, its flagship annual statistical publication, ADB says Asia has outstripped other regions in growth and employment creation since 1990. This has led to substantial improvements in living standards, but progress has been uneven in this heterogeneous region. Asia still remains home to most of the world’s poor with more than 40% of most countries’ populations living below the $2-a-day poverty line.

Lower-income countries are having difficulty meeting some of the Millennium Development Goal targets and where progress has lagged, social tensions may arise. Despite recent turmoil in financial markets, policymakers must keep focused on structural improvements.

As Asia grapples with globalization and changing demographics, including an expanding middle class and aging societies, it will face even more pressure to generate quality jobs that can satisfy public aspirations and support inclusive growth. Many of the new jobs that have been created in Asia are low-cost, low-wage manufacturing positions.

“The percentage of workers in informal employment in Asia remains sharply higher than in most other regions. Quality jobs are important for reducing poverty and income inequality, and for promoting social cohesion and political stability,” said ADB’s Chief Economist Changyong Rhee.

The special chapter, titled “Toward Higher Quality Employment in Asia,” says the pattern and rate of job creation across the region have been sharply mixed, and growth is not enough on its own to guarantee quality jobs with decent wages and conditions. The report says creating higher value-added jobs and increasing labor productivity are key to quality employment, and higher quality employment is the critical link between growth and poverty reduction. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the region, with economies at different stages of development.

Middle-income countries will need to promote trade and foreign direct investment, and develop human capital in order to move up the value chain of production, while diversifying the types of social protection measures. Low-income countries can benefit from increasing trade and facilitating smoother rural-urban migration. Productivity in rural areas needs to be improved, and technical and vocational training broadened. For these countries, informal workers need to be provided with a basic level of social protection.

“With appropriate demand and supply side policies and some levels of social protection, countries can make substantial progress towards developing higher quality employment in Asia that will enable it to continue its achievements in poverty reduction and inclusive growth,” Mr. Rhee said.

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TAIWAN: QUACK DEMOCRACY, POTENTIAL ABOMINATION

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

In the late 1990s, the Filipinos were aghast over the discovery of factories—owned by Taiwanese “businessmen”—that employed children as slave labor. The children were practically housed in cages, and brought out only to work and be fed, then brought back at night to their cage sleeping quarters. Needless to say, the mere tots were never paid for their labor and lived wretchedness like the way the Chinese suffered in the hands of the Kuomintang.

There is no need to belabor the concluding event about the matter: the closure of the criminal factories. After being rescued, the children narrated their harrowing experiences in the hands of their criminal employers—Taiwanese to stress the point—who, as we all know, are scions of the predatory fascist Kuomintangs of their pariah province of Taiwan.

Knowing the history of Kuomintangs—who mass slaughtered 30 Million+ Chinese women, children, old folks and helpless non-combatants during their incumbency as China’s rulers—I wouldn’t be surprised if the Taiwanese of today exude toxic levels of arrogance and hubris in relating to peoples of other countries. Nay, they behave like they own every country that would host them in their seemingly legal businesses!

Taiwan has been exhibiting nauseating quackery as a democracy and nation. Scions of criminal mass slaughterers, who are likewise a collective den of predatory criminal Triads, can never be expected to exhibit maximum civility save that for diplomacy’s sake they would feign civility and sense of culture.

Nations of the world are right all along in bestowing recognition of a single China, via a One China Policy. Such a bestowal on China of what is a true nation and harbinger of civility is the most appropriate action of genuine nations and true democracies, a bestowal that they previously had for Taiwan but which they withdrew eventually upon the glowing of prudence in their respective mental banks.

With the withdrawal of recognition—as sovereign nation—on the pariah province of Taiwan came the diminution of chances for Taiwan to join associations or coalitions of nations. Being located in the southeast could have qualified Taiwan to become a member of ASEAN. Thanks God that prudence prevailed upon the true nations, and that undercut the mass slaughterers from potentially dominating ASEAN and unleashing the fangs of fascist hatreds and genocidal campaigns within the region!

In the absence of a formal recognition of nationhood, what Taiwan had accomplished instead was to unleash the horrific bomb of Triad criminality on its neighbors. Why not investigate for yourself those so-called Taiwanese businessmen in your own respective country and trace where their capital is coming from. Don’t ever be surprised if you’d find out ala Eureka! that the Taiwanese capitalists in your country or city are mere fronts for the demonic criminal Triads.

Taiwan is a pariah state, a criminal state for that matter, and should perpetually be treated as such. Nations across the globe are better advised to pull out their investments and expatriate workers from the predator province for their own sake. Pariah states are ‘bad feng shui’ for emerging markets particularly, or ‘cursed states’ in Christian parlance.

The abominations of the Chiang Kai Shek mass slaughterers have been well embedded in the collective psyche of the Taiwanese, exquisitely encrypted in the genes of the younger scions of the butchers, such abominations later to wake up upon a collective rousing at some time in the future.

Before Taiwan could ever breed a future ‘Taiwanese race’ of abominations, the nations of the world already acted prudently enough. For indeed a scion of an abomination will in the future be an abomination likewise, and there will be no telling what predatory monstrosities such a race will unleash on the nations of the world.

To the Filipinos who are employed in Taiwan today, better craft your respective contingency plan to move out of the pariah province. Before the fate of the sardine-producing children enslaved by Taiwanese businessmen will strike you mercilessly, better come home. Go elsewhere to seek gainful employment back home or in any country other than Taiwan.

[Philippines, 01 March 2011]

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