The Philippines, Built To Fall

June 8th 2026 - Mindanao, Philippines. It's the start of the year for Filipino students and as the classroom settles in, the ground shakes. The school evacuates and buildings all around fall like flies. General Santos City, Sarangani, South Cotabato and Davao get torn up like nothing. As the day marches on, 92 people will die, over 1,300 will be injured and 113,000 homes will be damaged or destroyed. This was an earthquake at the magnitude of 7.8, the strongest since 1976 and the tenth deadliest in Filipino history.

Nearly 350,000 people were displaced from their homes. This is, however, not because of unforeseen consequences of nature or just another "act of god". The Philippines has always been plagued by seismic tensions, this was a choice. A choice by the system and those in control. For decades, the economic and social system that built houses, schools and hospitals was never built to stand the ground it sat on. It was built for profit and will continue to crumble for as long as this stays true.

Nothing New

None of this is at all new to the Philippines. 1968, Manila, The Ruby Tower came down and killed 268 people. That gave way to the first national building code in the Philippines. The knowledge and even the foundations to build upon those regulations, to ensure that buildings in the Philippines are safe, have been there since 1977, making them almost fifty years old.

Mindanao itself has had its fair share of warnings. In 2019, a string of major earthquakes struck Cotabato and Davao Del Sur, the same provinces as the ones in June. Matanao National Highschool had one of its buildings left abandoned in this 2019 earthquake and instead of repairing it or replacing it, it was left to sit there until June 8th when the next major earthquake knocked it down. The authorities can most definitely identify these buildings that are prone to disaster but choose not to do anything. There is at the very least, active knowledge that these earthquakes can kill people, yet where's the action?

Two weeks before Mindanao's June 8th Earthquake. There was Angeles City, May 24th, at the construction of a nine storey building, with no tremors nor trigger, it collapsed. 30 construction workers died and 8 injured.

When looking at earthquakes and understanding their impact, we cannot look over these 'incidents'. If there is active knowledge on building safe buildings and the constant possibility of a major earthquake, active knowledge on current unsafe buildings and the conscious decision to build a tower that was destined to fall even before a tremor hit, it demands our belief that this is a choice. But why?

Why Does This Continue?

Understanding why this keeps happening is crucial. We have building regulations, we have the understanding of the strength of these buildings so whenever there comes a solution from within Manila that proclaims it needs stricter regulation or perhaps even enforcement, there has been countless opportunities and chances for reforms or at least some kind of act to change however nothing significant has materialized over the years. Because the reason why this continues and people keep on dying is not one that is exactly a management issue but the structure of the system simply means, it is almost illogical to comply with safe building codes. To have a proper earthquake response team is not exactly something valuable.

The way that the system functions is at most times and especially here, mechanical and mathematical. The system that is, the market, will always choose that in the name of profit. This isn't just semantics, we see this in practice on June 8th.

The destruction across the region from the June 8th earthquake followed an economic divide. High commercial complexes, financial hubs and corporate buildings by major developers stood. They represent active revenue and a stream of profit that can be created so hence the cost of actually reinforcing these buildings with safety makes sense.

However, what about the less fortunate? Those that need homes but do not produce the income necessary to afford a house that has all the safety measurements in check, will buy or rent an unsafe house rather than stay out in the streets.

According to a situation report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the earthquake immediately disrupted over 6,200 public and private schools, leaving more than 3.2 million learners completely displaced from their classrooms. Municipal buildings, public gyms, and schools like Matanao National High School crumpled or were left abandoned because public infrastructure is treated as a dead expense on a balance sheet. We can see here that it's simply too much of a coincidence that the spaces that generate revenue are allocated with adequate engineering whereas the places for children and communities to gather have been forgotten in the dust. Literally.

This same logic compromises the very homes we live in. According to data compiled by Wikipedia's record of the 2026 Mindanao earthquake, the towns of Sarangani, Jose Abad Santos, Glan, and Malapatan suffered the highest percentage of residential destruction, with more than 30% of all homes severely damaged or entirely flattened in General Santos City alone.

These are not the condos of the elite. These were the homes of ordinary working class people who could not afford an actual standardized safe house. It's not that these families choose to live in any of these houses, it is more often that these houses are their only choices. Proper concrete, proper masonry, proper construction, under the system we live in, requires a price tag. Those who are disenfranchised, due to wages, lack of education, etc, are condemned to these houses. Never having a proper choice outside of what was presented by a system that could only function via profit.

Even Japan, which is considered the gold standard of preventing mass damage by disasters, has had incidents like Fukushima. Cost-cutting, deregulations and so on, eventually led to the one of the most devastating disasters in Japanese history because it made economical sense to have done that. This will forever remain for as long as the pursuit of profit stays king.

The Solution?

Tectonic plates will always move and shift, the lesson that we see from June 8th and the events prior is that even with regulations and so on, it is mostly ineffective because the way that a response team or a construction crew builds a building that is prone to collapse in an earthquake, is only relative to the economic conditions of the people there.

There has never been an adequate solution to poverty under the capitalist system in their endless hunger in creating value. And as long as poverty exists, there exists desperation and that means that there will always be more houses collapsing, more schools falling apart and more devastating earthquakes to come.

For the simple fact that under this system, it is only "logical". The solution that is presented forth from our understanding that regulations and so on can't provide safety under the capitalist context, is to entirely move away from a system that thinks only by something creating profit is "logical". June 8th is the result not of a tectonic plate but the simple process of doing only what is "valuable".

A teacher works day and night for the intention of uplifting and empowering children, but their efforts and their livelihoods are squashed and spat on by those who run our system.

For such important people that moulds a generations interest, hobbies and skills, we do not give them the necessary resources to live a life that is above that of what is considered poverty. A profession that requires so much diligence and patience is given so little consideration, so little time for them to prepare the materials and energy it takes to teach a class.

Teachers who shape our thoughts as individuals, should be a priority in our fight for a better future. One where we are more than a part of a production chain.

A Malaysian Government School Teacher is paid Rm2500-Rm3000. The income needed to stay above the absolute poverty line is Rm2705 in Malaysia as a whole. In Kuala Lumpur, anything below Rm3509 is to be considered "relatively poor".

Teachers are paid only for hours spent in school, yet must also prepare lessons, handle admin, manage student affairs, and attend staff development, none of which the school officially counts as work.

A 2007 Ministry of Education survey of over 19,000 teachers found secondary school teachers work an average of 67 hours per week. Well above the legal maximum of 45.

With such a heavy burden, it has been found that teaching in Malaysia is the most stressful occupation among 26 professions in a survey done (Wong & Tay 2010).

In 2013, the government explicitly announced and promised in their 2013 Malaysian education blueprint that some admin duties would be moved from teachers to dedicated services.

In the most recent education blueprint, it was promised that teacher's duties would be 80:20. Meaning that 80% of their time would be focused on teaching and the other 20% would be for other tasks. That remains unfulfilled.

Even in the 2025 budget, though there was a 40% increase in teacher training allocation, it only amounted to rm47 per teacher across 416,000 teachers nationwide.

During COVID-19, teachers had to spend their own money on devices, internet and electricity to conduct their own classes, the government's response? A one-off RM100 aid incentive to 400,000 teachers. Even the MP Syed Saddiq said "not even enough to buy stationery." Then by 2023, teachers had appealed to the government in their upcoming 2024 budget for a RM150 one-off aid for teachers so they wouldn't need to be burdened by buying class supplies from their own pocket. What happened then? Nothing.

In July 2025, Education minister Fadhlina Sidek declared that for the first time in the government's history, there was no longer a teacher shortage. Yet in that same month, the NUTP (Malaysia's Biggest Teacher Union) said there was a shortage of over 10,000 teachers and that it's a crisis, urgently calling on the government to address it.

This is not just incompetence. Across two blueprints, twelve years of frozen salaries, and budget after budget, the pattern is too consistent to just be 'accidental'.

But why are teachers treated this way? Teachers aren't treated this way by accident. It's because they are educated and aware, if not burdened to the bone, they and their students could collectively demand better facilities, wages, and policy.

The people who decide on budgets and policies, who make these promises every few years, have consistently and actively chosen otherwise.

It is ultimately against the interest of those who control fiscal policy and industry to have teachers treated well. Teachers are the most important component in producing a workforce. Every cost in a production chain is aimed to be minimised and if you cannot lower the wage of a worker, you lower the cost of producing them.

The same corporations that lobby for lower corporate taxes are the ones that benefit most from a public education system that produces obedient, test-trained workers at minimal cost to them. When the government underfunds education, it is essentially boosting private industry and producing a workforce that corporations profit from, trained at all of our expense with no accountability to either.

Malaysia's corporate tax rate for over the last decade, has remained at 24% whilst education spending is below the internationally recommended 6% of GDP. Someone is being prioritized here and it isn't teachers or students.

Students will still be forced by standardized testing to whatever the rich and powerful want to measure, the wellbeing of a teacher is no concern if it still means that a good amount of students fulfill the criteria that they need.

Teachers are placed in a position where they are so needed but posed such a significant threat if they have the ability to get together. A teacher who has time to think, can recognize what is wrong, a teacher who drowns in admin work and lives off scraps, can't.

What we must do is to advocate not just for better pay and a fairer workload for teachers but for us to refuse the struggle of teachers as separate from our own as students. That means we support teacher unions, question the lack of funding, understand why teachers are burnt-out, that it isn't their own shortcomings but the system working as intended.