By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
If this Covid-19 scare will continue, everybody will go through untold sufferings. Employers are already scaling down (PAL, for instance), others are transferring or closing down their plants like Honda Philippines. Smaller businesses that could not wait out the storm will close.
Joblessness will be common everywhere. So many will go hungry. Companies that will not close will just be idling instead of humming at high revs, with only minimal number of employees.
Those who will suffer the most are those in cities. Those with farms in the provinces will be the envy of everybody. They will have their own produce to survive on.
Certainly crime rates will sky rocket. Many diseases will emerge due to poor health out of poverty or lack of nutrients.
Some of the things that happened during the great depression in the US from 1929 to 1939 might be worth learning from.
Dr. Ravi Batra, of Indian descent but was one of the superstar economist in American and Canadian universities in the 1980s studied that difficult part of US history to come up with his book more than 30 years ago that became an international best seller– THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 1990.
A few things that he said I clearly remember. One is for those with money not to save all their money in one bank. For instance, in the Philippines only P500,000.00 of your money in a bank is insured by the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation so do not exceed that amount of savings in one bank.
Another important thing he said was there were some businesses or firms that actually progressed during that period.
One of these were educational institutions. During that time, there were millions of unemployed that applicants for one position would number in the hundreds or even thousands. So employers had a heyday choosing only the best of the best. These are the people who had the highest academic qualifications or those that graduated from the best educational institutions.
So the more college degrees you had, the better chances of your getting employed. Ordinary positions in factories were being filled with engineers instead of ordinary high school graduates. People sacrificed a lot so they could obtain college and postgraduate degrees to improve their employability. And academic institutions were only too happy to accommodate applicants for admission.
Some professionals also made a killing. Lawyers did not run out of work. Many law firms even expanded. They needed more and more attorneys trying to stave off for their clients foreclosures by banks and other financial institutions. Other companies, in order to save some of their assets or their operation had to declare bankruptcy and a lawyer is needed for this. Others would employ other legal tactics that are similar to declaration of bankruptcy. This would entail getting a court order to stop a foreclosure and to suspend payment of obligations due to some injustices committed.
These situations are some possibilities because of Covid-19.
The whole thing might be bad or good for me. I was actually thinking of ending my law practice and was wrapping up many of the cases still outstanding with me but then Covid-19 happened and I remembered Dr. Ravi Batra. I might have to stay longer in the legal profession with whatever time this publication will spare me. Let us see. **
