CHICKENPIE.Malacañang declared May 1 a regular holiday. DOLE is running job fairs in 90 cities. Two hundred thousand vacancies. The workers are at Mendiola.
These are not contradictory. They are the entire argument.
Kilusang Mayo Uno didn't march to celebrate Labor Day — they marched to collect on it. The bill is straightforward: living wages, price controls, secure jobs. The kind of thing a booth at a job fair cannot process. A job fair gives you a vacancy. A vacancy is not a salary. A salary is not a living wage. The workers know the difference because they've been balancing the math since before DOLE printed the flyers.
The minimum wage in Metro Manila is ₱645 a day. A family of four needs roughly ₱1,100. That gap — ₱455, every single day — is what all 90 job fairs are not discussing. Inflation ran between 5.6% and 6.4% last month. Fuel did not take a holiday. The 200,000 vacancies will not be updating their pay scales to meet the arithmetic. The government is proud of the booths. The workers brought calculators.
There's a photo somewhere — maybe 2018, maybe 2021 — a worker at Mendiola holding a sign that says the exact same thing as this year's KMU press release. Living wage. Price control. Security of tenure. The signs get recycled because nothing has changed enough to require new ones.
The march to Mendiola isn't theater. It's a receipt. Handed to whoever is listening — which today is mostly the PNP under full alert, making sure the receipt stays orderly and doesn't block traffic.
We've been here before. Not once. Not five times. Every year, same bridge, same demands, same government megaphone pointing at a job fair. The fair changes location. The math stays the same.
Two hundred thousand vacancies. Ninety sites. One Mendiola.
May Day isn't a celebration. It never was. It's a deadline.
