Structural inequalities embedded in semicolonial and semifeudal Philippine society, which perpetuates a feudal-patriarchal system and culture, have long entrenched women’s marginalized position within the economy. Women workers endure low wages and precarious working environments. In the countryside, women peasants face landlessness, militarization, and displacement—conditions that undermine both their livelihoods and their security. At the same time, they suffer gender-based violence and exploitation that this system legitimizes.
Amid the ongoing economic crisis brought about by imperialist neoliberal policies of Marcos Jr regime, their situation is further worsened by the US-Israel war of aggression against Iran. As oil prices soar, the cost of basic commodities continues to rise, while wages and farm incomes remain stagnant.
Yet, they refuse to remain silent in the face of these oppressive conditions. Women workers and peasants resist and organize, advancing collective struggles for decent living wages, better jobs, national industrialization, safe workplaces, and genuine land reform.
Women workers
The 2024 Philippine data shows that women’s labor participation remains lower at 52.3% compared to 75.2% for men, despite women comprising nearly half of the total labor force. At the same time, many women are concentrated in the informal sector, where wages are lower, and there is little to no access to benefits and labor protection. Kilusan ng Manggagawang Kababaihan (KMK, or Women Workers’ Movement), for instance, cites the case of women packers and sorters for e-commerce companies and their subcontracting agencies.
During the onslaught of Typhoon Uwan in November 2025, work was not suspended to accommodate the companies’ major promotional sale, known as “11.11”. For a meager wage of Php 550.20 (€7.88 at an exchange rate of Php 69.84), which is 20 pesos below the approved daily minimum, women workers were forced to wade through flood waters in Bulacan to reach logistics hubs.
Furthermore, as an austerity measure in response to rising oil prices, Marcos Jr signed Memorandum Circular 114 to implement the Compressed Work Week (CWW), in which the standard 40-hour workweek is compressed into four days. This means that instead of working eight hours a day, workers are required to work 10 to 12 hours. Beyond concerns over overtime pay, working more than 8 hours exposes workers to unsafe and exhausting working conditions. More importantly, the 8-hour work day is a historic victory of the working class against excessively long working days – a hard-won right that protects workers’ need for rest and humane conditions.
The CWW measure represents yet another way in which the Marcos Jr’s regime shifts the burden of the crisis to the people. Women workers, in particular, bear the brunt of this intensified burden, as longer working hours deepen their double burden of paid labor and unpaid care work. At the same time, women in working-class households are compelled to take on additional domestic and income-generating responsibilities to sustain their families, as heavy consumption taxes such as VAT and excise taxes further strain household incomes.
The current crisis presents a cruel irony for women workers: more and more women are compelled to seek work abroad, while women migrant workers are simultaneously threatened by the ongoing US-Israeli war of aggression in the Middle East. According to the Center for Women’s Resources (CWR), around 3,000 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) are currently facing charges, including 24 on death row. Likewise, many are vulnerable to human trafficking, illegal recruitment and scams.
Yet, many still take their chances and leave, despite these risks.
In 2024, around 1.25 million—more than half of the total 2.19 million OFWs—were women, many of whom are concentrated in low-paid and precarious sectors such as domestic work, caregiving, and service work. In 2025, a significant number of OFWs were deployed to the Middle East, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. In return, the Marcos Jr’s regime received a record-high USD 35.64 billion in cash remittances in 2024. Despite this, it has failed to ensure the safe return of Filipinos or provide adequate protection, especially for victims of human trafficking and exploitative labor practices. Worse, it remains tone-deaf to calls to dismantle VAT and excise taxes, and to create jobs at home instead of promoting labor-export.
Women peasants
In the countryside, women peasants carry the same heavy economic burden. They shoulder both domestic responsibilities and agricultural labor, working in the fields alongside their husbands or as daily wage farmworkers, and because of their gender, earn less than men.
For instance, in Panay, a female farmworker earns Php 270 per day while male farmworkers earn between Php 350 and 400 per day. Sugar farmworkers in Negros receive even less, with a meager piece-rate wage of as low as Php 82 per day.
As land tillers, peasants face the persistently rising costs – from seeds to basic commodities, especially amid the oil price hikes, forcing them to rely heavily on usurers, often under high interest and exploitative terms.
According to Amihan (National Federation of Peasant Women), the oil price hikes have driven up the price of rice from Php 48 per kilo to between Php 55 and Php 70, leaving many peasant families hungry—a burden that falls heavily on women, who manage household budgets and food.
As a result, many peasant women are forced to seek additional sources of income just to meet their basic needs, especially during the lean season. The jobs available to them in the countryside are often menial and low-paid, leaving women vulnerable to abuse and violence.
Beyond this, peasants also struggle to sell their produce at viable prices. This further limits women peasants’ already low and unstable incomes. Due to the Rice Liberalization Law, the Philippines imports rice from other countries, causing the local farmgate price of palay to drop sharply. In 2019, the average farmgate price fell to Php 15.63 per kilo, down from Php 20.14 the previous year. In some areas, prices dropped even further, ranging between Php 7 and Php 10 per kilo. Additionally, during typhoons, farms and crops are often severely damaged, leaving peasants with no harvest, thus, drowning them in debt.
At the root of these conditions is feudalism—a system that enables big landlord-compradors to own and control the vast majority of agricultural land in the country. As a result, landlessness persists. Without land of their own, peasants are forced to rely heavily on landlords and usurers for capital, including seeds and farm inputs.
According to IBON Foundation, 78.2%—or roughly seven out of ten—agricultural families are landless, while only 4.3 million have ownership of or secure rights to the land they till.
Marcos Jr. refuses to genuinely address persistent landlessness. Despite decades of
the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), many peasants remain landless. His neo-liberal and populist agrarian programs such as the New Agrarian Emancipation Act (NAEA)—a debt relief measure, and the World Bank-funded Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT), amount to token measures that fail to resolve the problem of landlessness.
Instead, the Marcos Jr’s regime unleashes state terror and fascism against urban and peasant communities through its counterrevolutionary and anti-development scheme – the National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD) 2025 – 2028, primarily enforced by NTF-Elcac together with the mercenary Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP).
Since the start of his presidency, there have been thousands of documented human rights violations, including killings, abductions, torture, arrest, and detention, as well as, forced evacuation and displacement. Intensified militarization involving combat operations, aerial strafing and bombing force residents to leave their homes and farms. Likewise, the Balikatan war exercises directly threatenthe women peasants’ livelihood and contributes to a climate of fear in affected communities.
Women workers’ and peasants’ struggles
Women workers and peasants firmly resist these oppressive and exploitative conditions. Beyond organizing in factories, migrant communities, and rural areas, they conduct studies, launch sectoral campaigns, mobilize communities, and build alliances with other women to advance the rights and welfare of workers and peasants. Across sectors, these struggles are interconnected, rooted in the same conditions of exploitation, landlessness, and economic uncertainty.
At present, the women workers’ movement calls for across-the-board wage increases, the nationalization of the oil industry, and the junking of the Oil Deregulation Law, which enables the “Big Three” (Petron, Caltex, and Shell) to monopolize oil prices, as well as the removal of VAT and excise taxes. Together with other women workers’ groups, they also push for stronger implementation and amendments to the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Law and endorse the Safe World of Work Bill to ensure workplaces free from gender-based violence.
Women migrant workers demand better jobs at home, better protection and security abroad, a safety net upon returning, and an end to the labor-export policy.
Peasant women demand genuine land reform – land for those who till it. They also support the broader peasant movement’s call for a Php 50,000 subsidy for farmers affected by rising production costs.
In response, Marcos Jr’s regime weaponizes the law and intensifies state repression to suppress struggling women workers and peasants, resulting in mounting human rights violations. Leaders are red-tagged and terror-tagged, vilified by the NTF-Elcac, and oftenarrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges—or worse, abducted, forcibly disappeared, or killed.
Cases in point include the red- and terror tagging of Migrante Philippines Chairperson Criselda Fiel; Ugnayan ng Manggagawa sa Agrikultura-Isabela Dominga Aberion; Amihan leader Miriam Villanueva; and Nexperia union leader Mary Ann Castillo, as well as the disappearance of women workers’ organizer Loi Magbanua, among many others.
Despite these vicious and relentless attacks, women workers and peasants continue to resist and push back against exploitation and state fascism. As they dare to struggle and dare to win alongside broader people’s movements, they advance the fight for national industrialization and genuine agrarian reform, and an end to gender-based violence rooted in the feudal-patriarchal system.