“GIVE the worker his wages before his sweat dries.” This Islamic saying reminds us about protecting labor. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) did not speak of economics in the language of stock markets or spreadsheets. He spoke of sweat. Sweat is universal. It has no religion, no ethnicity, no political color. It is the silent ink with which every honest worker signs a covenant with society.
A nation is much like a woven banig. Each strand appears fragile on its own, yet together they carry the weight of a family. Remove enough strands, and the mat slowly unravels. Our economy is woven in the same way. The mason who builds our homes, the farmer who coaxes rice from reluctant soil, the fisher who waits for dawn, the factory worker who stands through endless shifts, the vendor arranging vegetables before sunrise and the small shop owner counting every peso at day’s end — all are threads in the same weave. If one thread snaps, the whole fabric weakens.
The conversation about wages should never become a tug of war where one side celebrates while the other bleeds. A wage is not merely a number printed on a payroll. It is the distance between anxiety and dignity. It is medicine on a kitchen shelf, notebooks inside a child’s school bag, rice simmering in a pot and the quiet relief of knowing tomorrow’s meal is not another unanswered prayer.
Yet justice also asks us to look beyond the factory gate. Across our rural communities, many employers are themselves carrying heavy sacks uphill. Family-owned businesses, cooperatives and small farms struggle against rising fuel prices, costly fertilizer, uncertain harvests and markets that often reward the middleman more than the producer. If we ask workers to carry the weight alone, we fail. If we ask small enterprises to carry it alone, we fail again. Justice cannot walk on one leg.
Perhaps this is why I appreciated hearing Sen. Robinhood Padilla continue to support the call for better wages. It is a position that echoes a legacy inherited from his father, Roy Padilla, a labor leader who understood that behind every worker’s demand is a family hoping not for luxury, but for fairness. The story reminds us that advocacy often begins at the family table before it reaches the halls of government.
The Quran teaches us that Allah commands justice (adl) and excellence (ihsan). Justice is not a scale that crushes one side to lift the other. It is a bridge built carefully from both banks of the river. The worker and the employer do not stand as enemies shouting across the current; they stand as travelers who can only cross if the bridge is strong enough to carry them both.
When bread comes out of the oven, we do not wait for it to grow cold before sharing it with those who are hungry. In the same spirit, labor should not wait endlessly for dignity. Before the sweat dries, before the bread cools, before hope slips quietly out the back door, may we remember that the true wealth of a nation is measured not by the height of its buildings, but by how faithfully it honors the hands that built them.