08/03/2026
Women Workers Rise: VAT Tanggalin, Sahod Pataasin, Kurakot Panagutin!
On International Working Women’s Day, Women Workers United (WWU) joins women across the Philippines in raising a militant and united call: VAT Tanggalin, Sahod Pataasin, Kurakot Panagutin!
This year’s commemoration takes place amid intensifying global and domestic crises that deepen the exploitation and hardship faced by women workers. The escalating conflict in the Middle East triggered by the military aggression of the United States and Israel against Iran has driven global oil prices upward, threatening to unleash another wave of increases in fuel costs, electricity rates, transport fares, and the prices of basic commodities. Once again, it is workers—especially women workers and poor families—who are forced to bear the heaviest burden of global crises they did not create.
The conflict also places Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in the Middle East—most of whom are women—at grave risk of injury, displacement, and death. Among the first casualties is Mary Anne Velazquez de Vera, a migrant caregiver from Pangasinan, who lost her life protecting and guiding her elderly patient to safety during a missile strike. Her death underscores the extreme vulnerability of women OFWs, whose labor sustains families back home even as they face life‑threatening conditions abroad.
At the same time, the administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. continues to disregard the urgent demands of workers for a living wage and meaningful relief from soaring prices such as by immediately removing regressive taxes such as the Value Added Tax (VAT) and excise taxes on fuel, the government has pushed energy conservation measures and a four-day work week in government offices—responses widely criticized by workers as stop-gap measures that are disconnected from the real economic hardships faced by women and ordinary families.
Women workers—who are concentrated in low-paid, insecure, and undervalued jobs—are among those hardest hit by stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Moreover, women continue to shoulder the overwhelming burden of unpaid care work in households and communities: raising children, caring for the sick and elderly, and sustaining families and communities despite deepening economic hardship.
Corruption intensifies these inequalities. Public funds that should finance essential services such as health care, childcare, education, and social protection are routinely plundered or misused. Despite repeated corruption scandals and widespread public outrage, there remains a persistent failure to hold accountable those at the highest levels of power. Political and economic elites continue to enjoy impunity while workers and poor communities suffer the consequences of stolen public resources, deteriorating services, and worsening inequality.
For women workers, corruption is economic violence. Every peso stolen from public funds is a peso taken away from hospitals, schools, childcare services, social protection, and other vital programs that support working families.
Furthermore, regressive taxation continues to punish workers and poor households. The Value Added Tax (VAT) forces women workers and poor families to subsidize a system that protects the wealth of billionaires and large corporations while extracting from those who have the least.
Women Workers United demands the immediate scrapping of VAT and excise taxes on fuel and basic commodities, alongside the implementation of a wealth tax to ensure that the richest individuals and corporations finally pay their fair share. Public resources must be redirected toward strengthening public services and building a robust system of publicly funded care services.
WWU reiterates the urgent demand to abolish regional wage rates, a system that institutionalizes inequality and traps millions of workers—especially women—in poverty. Wage policies must guarantee equal and adequate pay for all workers across the country. WWU demands the implementation of a national living wage that allows workers and their families to live with dignity. Women workers cannot continue to survive on poverty wages while prices soar and corporate profits expand.
Women workers in the informal economy—including street vendors, home-based workers, domestic workers, and Barangay Health Workers—remain among the most marginalized in the labor force. They endure unstable incomes, unsafe working conditions, lack of benefits and social protection, yet continue to carry the heaviest burden of rising prices and regressive taxation.
Women Workers United underscores the urgent need for publicly funded care systems, including childcare, elder care, and community-based health services. Women’s unpaid care labor sustains households, communities, and the broader economy, yet it remains systematically ignored and unsupported by state policies.
Women Workers United strongly condemns the ongoing military aggression of the United States and Israel against Iran and calls for an immediate ceasefire. Imperialist wars and militarism devastate communities, displace families, and divert enormous resources away from public services toward military expansion.
Women workers reject imperialist wars, militarism, and the rise of authoritarian and fascist politics. The struggle for workers’ rights, gender justice, peace, and economic democracy are inseparable.
International Working Women’s Day was born from the militant struggles of women workers who organized, struck, and fought against exploitation and oppression. Today, that legacy continues as women workers rise to confront corruption, poverty wages, regressive taxes, economic injustice, fascism, and imperialism.
Women workers will continue to organize, mobilize, and fight for a society where labor is valued, corruption is punished, wages are just, and peace, justice and dignity prevail.
