Transaction fees worse than usury

This year's All Saints' and All Souls' Days that fell on Friday and Saturday, respectively, gave us another long weekend.

To give us all Filipinos lead time to plan ahead on where to spend our non-working days with our families, Malacañang Palace released last week the list of official holidays and other special non-working holidays for 2025. After all, this will promote the "holiday economics" as a policy that President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. (PBBM) reinstituted in our country.

The holiday economics became a government policy in 2007 when then president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo signed Republic Act (RA) 9492, allowing the Chief Executive to move holidays that fall on a Wednesday or Sunday to the closest Monday. While this had become acceptable to most sectors, workers who are not permanently employed who fall under the labor laws on no-work, no-pay were not happy about it. Thus, the holiday economics policy was scrapped after the late president Benigno Simeon "Noynoy" Aquino III assumed office in June 2010.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, former president Rodrigo Duterte signed a proclamation declaring fewer non-working days in 2021 supposedly to boost the economy that hit negative growth due to lockdowns. In his Proclamation, Nov. 2 (All Souls' Day), Dec. 24 (Christmas Eve), and Dec. 31 (New Year's Eve), which had been special holidays in the past, were declared as special working days. "For the country to recover from the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need to encourage economic productivity by, among others, minimizing work disruption and commemorating some special holidays as special (working) days instead," the Duterte proclamation stated.