Four years after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. assumed office promising to uplift the welfare of Filipino workers and improve the country’s education system, teachers and workers continue to suffer from depressed wages, rising costs of living, chronic understaffing, and deteriorating working conditions, according to the Alliance of Concerned Teachers-Philippines.
Unfulfilled promises
The Marcos administration entered office with promises of better salaries for teachers, reduced administrative workload, fair compensation for overtime and teaching overload, and stronger government support for public education. Four years later, teachers remain overworked, underpaid, and forced to shoulder the consequences of government’s chronic neglect of the education sector.
The administration’s announcement of an P85 daily wage increase for minimum wage earners in Metro Manila only underscores the growing wage crisis confronting Filipino workers. Any wage increase won by workers is welcome, but let us not mistake crumbs for genuine economic relief. The P85 increase remains grossly inadequate against the relentless rise in the prices of food, transportation, housing, utilities, fuel, and other basic necessities. Workers deserve living wages—not piecemeal adjustments that are immediately wiped out by inflation.
Teachers bear additional burdens
Teachers, as workers, continue to experience the same erosion of purchasing power while bearing the additional burden of sustaining an underfunded public education system. Public school teachers continue to subsidize education with their own labor, time, and income. Many still spend out of their own pockets for classroom materials while managing overcrowded classes, excessive paperwork, and responsibilities that extend far beyond teaching. These conditions expose the widening gap between the government’s rhetoric and the daily realities confronting our educators.
While teachers have secured gains in recent years—including the increase in the Teaching Supplies Allowance—these were only achieved through years of sustained collective struggle by teachers, education workers, and their organizations.
Key commitments remain unfulfilled
Meanwhile, key commitments repeatedly made by the Marcos administration—including reducing teachers’ administrative workload, ensuring fair compensation for overtime and teaching overload, providing meaningful career progression, and substantially improving teachers’ salaries—remain largely unfulfilled. These continue to be demands that teachers must fight for.
The group also pointed to the continuing shortages of classrooms, teachers, and education support personnel, which have further intensified teachers’ workload and undermined the quality of public education.
Survival crisis for educators
The greatest crisis confronting teachers today is survival itself. No educator who has dedicated their life to teaching should have to worry whether their salary will be enough to feed their family, pay rent, or meet their children’s educational needs. Yet this has become the daily reality for thousands of Filipino teachers.
We reiterate our call for an entry-level salary of P50,000 for public school teachers, a P5,000 Personnel Economic Relief Allowance, a P1,200 daily minimum wage for all workers, the immediate hiring of teachers and education support personnel, accelerated classroom construction, genuine decongestion of classes, the elimination of excessive non-teaching tasks, and substantially increased public investment in public education.
Four years under the Marcos administration have shown that teachers and workers cannot rely on promises alone. We call on teachers, education workers, fellow workers across all sectors, parents, students, and the Filipino people to continue the fight for living wages, better working conditions, and quality public education. Only through a united and organized movement can we compel the government to fulfill its obligations to those whose labor keeps our schools, our communities, and our nation running.
