Declaring that globalization is a great opportunity to modernize and develop the Philippines, the Ramos government has embarked on an aggressive program of liberalization, as with practically all governments all over the globe. What is even more different and alarming for the Philippines is that the Ramos government has implemented what it calls a Super-Liberalization Program - reducing tariffs on a faster schedule than the country's commitments to the GATT. Instead of the deadline of 2010, the country's deadline has been reset to the year 2004, earlier even than the deadline for developed economies. As a result, the Philippines has one of the most liberal financial and banking systems, mining policies, retail trade, etc. in a region that is already quite advanced in the implementation of liberalization.
The Medium Term Philippine Development Plan 1994-1998 with the slogan Philippines 2000 exemplifies the implementation of globalization for the Philippines. The program targets the achievement of NIC status for the Philippines through the promotion of exports, the continuation of the current debt policies and the attraction of foreign investments.
Meant to increase exports and foreign investments into agribusiness, agriculture has been restructured resulting in the displacement of tens of thousands of agricultural workers and peasants due to speculative landgrabbing, land use conversions and crop conversions. On the other hand, traditional food and cash crops have been increasingly displaced in the market as a result of the GATT imposition, opening the country to agricultural imports which were previously prohibited like cereals, garlic, onions, coffee, potatoes, cabbage and other vegetables.
Overall, globalization has intensified the problems of labor in the Philippines. Promising jobs, it has further increased endemic unemployment typical of a Third World country. Promising poverty alleviation, it has assured low wages and superprofits for monopoly capital through wages that are half the cost of living. Promising livelihood, it has actually displaced petty producers and small enterprises because of unfair competition from cheap imports.
The Philippines has very high unemployment rates typical of an underdeveloped semi-colonial, semi-feudal society. Official unemployment figures which put unemployment for 1996 at 7.4% down from 8.4% in 1995 are misleading of the large disguised unemployment in the "informal sector" typical of a crisis-ridden Third World country. This large mass of unemployed semi-proletarians who eke out a living from odd jobs, hawking and working the garbage dumps are not reflected in the data on unemployed. An indication of job scarcity would be to put together government data on unemployment and underemployment which comes up to 22% or 36% in 1996, the latter figure factors in labor migration which is now removed from the labor force.
The Ramos government promises substantial increases in employment as a result of the liberalization program. But because the bulk of investments have been portfolio investments or FDIs in speculative sectors, new jobs have not been substantial. The government announced 750,000 new jobs in 1995 which was wiped out in net terms because of a 570,000 increase in the labor force and 180,000 loss of jobs, two thirds of them in agriculture. This prompted the ILO itself to raise its concern about jobless growth.
While job generation has barely kept pace with the growth of the labor force, labor is faced with the additional threat of dismissals due to retrenchments and bankruptcies. Increased competition as a result of liberalization has pushed companies to streamline and rationalize operations and contractualization of the work force. This has meant the removal of older, higher paid work forces in favor of younger, lower paid ones, the subcontracting of secondary aspects of production/business, the hiring of contractuals or utilizing agency-hire workers (labor-only contracting). Retrenchments have reached alarming proportions.
An example of this widespread phenomenon is Shoemart, one of the biggest department store chains in the Philippines. Shoemart has an estimated total of 20,000 employees, but only 1,731 rank and file employees are regular and protected by the collective bargaining agreement between the local union and management. The rest are provided by recruiting agencies and are hired in contracts of less than six months. Aside from labor-only contracting, Shoemart also employs "consignment" schemes where store consignees have to hire their own workers who are actually part of the whole sales force but deals only with their respective consignee-employers.
Such labor flexibilization schemes are the reason for the very small percentage of unionized employees and the beleaguered state of the labor union. Not only are the majority of the workers denied their right to unionize and the benefits derived therefrom, but these schemes are so disempowering and reinforce feudal-patriarchal views and relations among the mostly female salesforce. Sexual harassment is also common as "lie down or lay-off" practices are common, which means female employees have to pass through a "casting couch" in order to pass hiring tests, and would again have to fulfill the sexual desires of superiors in order not to be laid off.
Bankruptcies have increased (data) not only as a result of the failure of local companies engaged in local production to compete with cheaper imports, but also as a result of export-oriented companies which are becoming increasingly disadvantaged in the global market as a result of low productivity, and lack of government assistance. Other plant closures are not the result of bankruptcies, as their owners claim, but are a common device for union busting.
An example of this is Solid Corp., the Philippine manufacturer of Sony products which closed its plant in Valenzuela, Metro Manila, resulting in the termination of 200 regular workers not to mention contractuals and trainees. The union was told that the closure was due to productivity, but the company is opening a larger plant in the LIIP industrial estate in the province of Laguna utilizing a work force composed of contractual workers.
Besides secondary considerations of productivity, the real issue is that fact that the company was negotiating the CBA when the company suddenly announced the closure. The union accuses the management of bargaining in bad faith and suspects that the company will eventually reopen the plant with a new contractual workforce altogether. In order to fight for their jobs, the union has set up a picketline in the closed plant.
As a result of IMF impositions for fiscal management, the government is under a strict program to reduce the budget and end the budget deficit. This belt tightening from the previous decade has resulted in a program for reengineering and streamlining the bureaucracy, resulting in retrenchments. From 1991 to 1995, a total of 507,813 public sector workers lost their jobs according to the report of COURAGE, the militant public sector union aligned with the KMU. Under the Ramos government, 300,000 government employees were affected. Besides these programs, the devolution of social services and regulatory functions to local governments under the new Local Government Code also resulted in the dismissal of 100,000 employees.
Another reason for the dismissals is privatization. The privatization of the waterworks utility MWSS has resulted in the removal of 2,000 workers out of the total 5,700 which availed of an early retirement program. The target of the new owners is to reduce the labor force to only 500.
The government promised to reduce poverty from 39.2% to only 30% within five years of Philippines 2000, its program for globalization. The government has claimed that poverty has been reduced to 35.7% in 1996. This figure is based on the government's downscaling of the poverty standard to only PhP184.60 (for the National Capital Region) for the year 1994. Already the minimum wage of PhP165 for 1996 which the majority of workers do not actually receive, is below the poverty standard.
But the government's poverty standard is questionable and has removed several items from the 1998 cost of living standards of PhP151.12. In current terms, this has reached the amount of PhP371.24 for 1996. If we use this figure as the poverty threshhold for incomes, poverty affects 76% of Filipino families. In short, only a small percentage of employed persons, and not the typical worker, lives decently.
The greatest impact of low incomes and irregular livelihood is in the rural areas where poor peasants and farm workers receive much, much less than the government mandated wages of PhP144 and farms have very low productivity due to landlordism and backward farming systems. As a result, rural to urban migration has become a consistent systemic phenomenon affecting all regions of the country for several decades. In 1990, for example, urban centers and highly urbanizing regions received net inflows of migration while the other regions had net outflows. These rural migrants end up usually in slums and squatter areas where they eke out a living in the so-called informal sector. Urban poor population of the largest cities account for a significant percentage of the total populations like Manila - 8.85%, Quezon City - 9.22% and Cebu City - 5.38%.
Because of low incomes, it is quite common for each household to have more than one breadwinner in order to make ends meet. Both spouses are forced to work resulting in a greater burden to the women for additional reproductive work. But since women are discriminated in employment, many women find self-employment in the informal sector through petty trades. In worse cases, the children are mobilized to assist in the livelihood, including hawking cigarettes and flowers in the city streets, their baptism as streetchildren.
One harsh option from this poverty is labor migration, a common phenomenon underdeveloped countries like the Philippines. But migration reached crisis proportions in the late 1970s when the government to actually promoted the deployment of Filipinos for overseas jobs, starting with the petrodollar-rich Middle East countries. This was a win-win move for the government to deflate unemployment and earn dollars from income remittances in response to the failure of employment generation (mainly expected from the Marcos land reform program) and the critical need for foreign exchange as a result of the debt crisis. But this was not a win-win situation for the Filipino workers who became well-known for their adaptability and hard-work, besides being well trained and proficient in English.
For the past decade, the Philippines is number one source of migrant labor. From the period 1983 to 1993, the Philippines deployed an annual average of 613,700 legally processed contract workers compared to 123,240 from Pakistan, 118,970 from Bangladesh and 125,500 from India (1983-1991 average). There are now an estimated 7 million Filipinos working in 129 countries all over the world.
In a study made by OWWA, it was shown that for a substantial number of OCWs, their jobs abroad were their first jobs, in short they left mainly to find employment and not simply to find a better pay. Migrant labor thrive because of wage differentials and are exploited mainly by their employers in the host countries who take advantage of hiring migrant workers to avoid high wages in the host countries. However, migrant labor is exploited two more times, once more by the recruitment agencies which take advantage of extreme unemployment and poverty and charge incredible hiring and processing fees and furthermore, by the government which extracts excessive fees and insurance premiums. In order to pay tens of thousands of pesos of fees and insurance premiums before even departing for the host country to work, the contract workers normally go to loan sharks which will eat up their first pay envelopes and require monthly deductions.
The increasing number of cases of deaths, incarcerations, derangement and the like attest to the extreme oppression and exploitation that overseas contract workers face. From an of one OCW dead for various reasons per day in the previous decade, this has increased to an average of three per day from 1991-1995. The case of Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan are not uncommon as the list of Filipinos unjustly incarcerated and/or executed, the same as the list of OCWS killed under dubious circumstances grows longer each year.
But because OCWs are not nationals, they are not only discriminated but are targetted by foreign law and reactionary public opinion which assume that their only intention is to emigrate and take away precious jobs and services. Three key points are then buried from the public consciousness: that migrant labor is the loss of labor-exporting countries and concrete substantial gain for the host countries as they contribute much more in terms of products and services than the wages they earn, that income remittances constitute less reserves drain than imports, and that migrant labor is a tool of monopoly capital to extract greater profits from labor and the only positive proletarian response is to recognize them as part of the national labor force and work for the equal implementation of labor standards.
This labor export policy of the government has paid off in the sense that since 1990 the income remittances of OCWs have compensated for the outflow of import payments and TNC profit remittances resulting in positive net factor income from abroad. This also made the GNP a more important indicator than the GDP for a labor-exporting country like the Philippines. Since 1992 remittances through official bank channels have hit the two billion dollar mark and have increased by a billion every year. Remittances through unofficial channels have been estimated to be equal this amount.
Working abroad has not made OCW families' rich, but has at least allowed them to cope with increasing costs of living. Unlike the usual working family, OCW families are able to send their children to school, are able to buy home appliances and in some cases buy low to medium cost housing.
Genuine, democratic trade unionism reached its peak at the height of the struggle against the dictatorship and in the few years after the downfall of the dictatorship. In this period trade unionism achieved prominence and broad support, and workers became aggressive in the formation of trade unions and in the pursuit of their economic demands, besides participation in political issues. However, the strength of the trade unions was the worry of the capitalists because it immediately led to an increase in labor disputes and strikes and raised their wages resulting in less profits and less attractiveness to foreign investors.
The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines was discredited as the Marcos fascist trade union, but was able to field one of its leaders as one of the administration party's candidates for Senator. Herrera became an ironic symbol as labor's representative in the Senate -- he sponsored the unpopular bill which eventually became the Labor Code despite widespread protests from various sectors of labor (except the conservative TUCP, of course). Ten years after, everyone now concedes that this law needs to be revised urgently. Of course, the government has another reason for its efforts to revise the law.
The greatest disservice of the Herrera Law is its criminalization of the strike -- limiting the issues for which a strike can be legally called, creating a long, difficult process before workers can go on strike, allowing the assumption by government of jurisdiction over disputes thus further constricting the workers options to strike to force management to accede to their demands, and providing for penalties to workers and their leaders involved in a strike that is deemed illegal.
This law had two major effects. First, it became an effective tool for union busting as capitalists could now easily find reasons to legally dismiss union leaders and activists with the help of corrupt bureaucrats at the DOLE. In many cases, management increased provocative actions to egg workers into an "illegal" strike, like unfair labor practices which were no longer strikeable. Second, this law dampened labor militancy as workers were no longer able to strike on many issues, and further, they started to think hard before taking the risk of the strike. In the process, unions accepted management impositions and unfair labor practices because they had no recourse.
As a result, the Herrera Law gave capitalists the broad room for maneuver which capitalists immediately took advantage of to implement policies to increase productivity and profitability. It became easy for them to retrench workers and replace them with casuals or contractuals, to push workers to work weekends or holidays for less pay, to work overtime without overtime pay and the like.
Among other things, the Herrera Law also added new mechanisms that would make it difficult for workers to organize competitive, militant unions against yellow, company unions. The length of the CBA period was increased, including the period between CBA's and the mechanisms for certification of unions.
While labor unions are one in their concern that the Labor Code must be revised, only such progressive unions as KMU want it repealed altogether. On the other hand, the government has rode on the agitation to amend the Labor Code, but its concern is to make the labor code more responsive to the demands of globalization.
Among their proposals is the extension of the apprenticeship system to three years, legally preventing the worker the right to receive mandated minimum wages, benefits and job security. Another proposal is to legalize labor only contracting in various jobs and circumstances. Another proposal is to legalize "flexibilization", giving way to legalization of such unfair labor practices as forced overtime, job sharing and temporary plant closures.
With the Herrera Law in place, businesses went on a casualisation and contractualization spree. Casual and contractual workers, besides workers under categories as trainees and apprentices do not receive any protection or job security and are not eligible for any benefits. They are not eligible to join or form unions and are therefore commonly paid lower than minimum wage.
The most important effect of globalization on labor is this phenomenon of contractualization or flexible-hiring schemes which take maximum advantage of the labor market to hire the best labor force on the cheapest terms. The main method of achieving this is by reducing the expensive regular workers to the bare minimum in the most important positions in the production process and in supervision, removing the bulk of the workforce and replacing them with casuals and contractuals, and rationalizing ancillary departments and services to labor contractors and job subcontractors. Of course, this is combined with other direct efforts to reduce labor costs.
As early as 1992, an ILO study revealed that 73% of factories in the Philippines were already implementing various forms of flexible working arrangements. These include labor-only contracting, contract and casual hiring, piece-rate and part-time system, rotations, extension of workweeks and other cost-cutting schemes.
A casual/contractual employee works for less than six months and is therefore not qualified for benefits and protection for job security and the like, besides being eligible to be a member or form unions. A contractual employee works for a fixed short-term contract, while a casual employee has an open-ended contract but is terminated before six months of service. Factories or enterprises engaged in mass, hand production like garments, electronics subcontractors and handicrafts or in unskilled or semi-skilled work are adaptable to the system of using casuals, including piece-rate, apprentice and trainees. A DOLE study from 1988-1990 showed that 40% of factories are employing temporary or casual workers, most of these foreign companies in the electronics industry. Small and medium sized employers which receive subcontracting work for garments and electronics exporters commonly maintain casual and/or piece-rate workers.
For example, Laws Textile which exports shirts mainly to the US for such clients like JC Penney has only 390 regular workers but 1,700 contractuals which are mostly semi-skilled new recruits from the governments technical training schools and are contracted for only three months at a time.
Manila Bay Hosiery is the main producer of socks and employed thousands of workers but reduced their workforce slowly to only 257 at present while increasing the number of contractuals. Additionally, management set up an "independent" shop inside the factory which employs workers on five-month contracts and to which the company subcontracts job orders.
Labor-only contracting (LOC) allows even more flexibility and less costs for the factory because the workforce is now agency-hired and management is shielded from issues of benefits, unionization and work scheduling. LOC is theoretically illegal, but the Labor Code has made a very narrow definition of LOC thus allowing for easy loopholes for its practice.
As of 1995, there are 252 local recruitment and placement agencies which reported placing 49,055 workers. The number of unlicensed recruiters is estimated to be double this number. Once a factory has contractualized the majority or all of its labor force, resorting to placement agencies is only a matter or time because of the obvious advantages: there are less disruptions in production because of the turn-over, there is less paperwork, and the company has a buffer for imposing work schedules and the like. Heaviest hit by agency hiring are workers in services and trade, a prominent example being Shoemart mentioned above.
A prominent albeit slightly unusual example is San Miguel Corp which is the largest food and beverage corporation in the Philippines. It generates four percent of the country's GNP, with profits hitting beyond P11.8 B and accounts for 6% of the country's total tax revenues. It is one of the three Philippines corporations which made it to the 50 top TNCs from the Third World. As an effect of globalization, SMC has been implementing a streamlining program to reduce production costs. Departments which were considered dispensable were closed down and early retirement schemes were offered removing thousands of workers in various branches and subsidiaries.
In an unusual form of labor contractualization, SMC laid off workers at its Manila Glass Plant at del Pan, Manila, in 1992 ostensibly to cut down on productions costs and organized laid off workers into a cooperative which serves as a labor agency supplying contractual for non-core production positions. The union was not able to fight the retrenchment as early retirement plans involving huge sums of money were dangled to the workers. Part of the separation pay (involving 150% of monthly pay per year of service) served as capital for the cooperative.
Unlike the usual agency hiring, the workers are not terminated before six months in order to evade local laws which mandate permanent status after six months of employment. The workers, who are now working in their old positions as contractuals through their cooperative, work continuously, but do not enjoy benefits, wage increases and job security -- they are the first to get booted out during seasonal retrenchments. Cooperative members receive wages of P180 per day compared to a daily-paid worker who receives up to P400.
Cost-cutting also calls for flexible work schedules, oftentimes requiring workers to undergo job rotations and the like to reduce expenses for overtime pay and increase productivity per workers. An example of this is Wyeth Philippines which changed its workweek schedule called the "6-2" scheme where an employee works continuously for six days and gets two days off. As a result, the worker works on Saturdays and Sundays without overtime pay and is forced to work more than 40 hours per work week in violation of the CBA. Since this rescheduling was proposed in 1994, the union fought bitterly until the National Labor Relations Commission intervened and approved this rule early 1996.
The impact of contractualization and such other forms of flexible hiring is to increase the number of nonunionizable workers - workers which by law are not allowed to join or form unions. In the Philippines, only 47.7 % are wage earners (1994), and of them only 75% are unionizable (employed in enterprises employing 10 or more). But the big number of these workers are employed by subcontractors -- sweatshops where workers are casual or piece-rated and thus not eligible to form unions. In a DOLE 1994 survey of establishments, 29.8% of wage workers were not time-rated workers, but of the balance, less than one half or only 31% of wage workers were unionized.
While the number of unions has increased over the years to 8,241 with a total membership of 3,605,000, or 28% of wage earners (out of a total labor force of 29.6 million), the number of CBAs has actually decreased from its peak in 1990 with 4,982 in force to 3,445 covering only 413,000 workers.
But the bigger blow to unionism is not so much the big number of non-unionizable workers, but the shift by large companies to hire the bulk of their production force as casual or contractual, resulting in a bigger shrinkage of unionizable workers and the weakening of the union's bargaining position within each enterprise. Unions are left helpless as they become anachronistic to the majority of employees in one enterprise and lose control over production and workers issues.
It is no wonder then than contractualization has also been closely identified with efforts of businesses to bust unions, replacing regular workers with contractuals or closing down shops and replacing them with new shops hiring only contractuals. This is the case of Magnolia-Nestle where the workers are currently in the thick of their struggle against contractualization and union busting.
Before Nestle merged with the Magnolia dairy products division of the San Miguel Corporation, the union has been successful in holding out the retrenchment program that was being implemented to impose contractualization. Since 1988, the company had stopped hiring workers on a regular basis, opting to hire contractuals instead. By 1995, contractuals comprised two-third of the labor force in the company. The union went on strike in late 1995 to protest unfair labor practices, including the retrenchment program.
In October 1995, after the transfer of Magnolia to Nestle, the management refused to negotiate with the union, and afterwards Nestle forced ll workers to retire and "selective rehire" the others. This means the reversal of gains achieved in the previous CBAs.
Issues regarding the evaluation of jobs, wage adjustments and others were finally resolved through a settlement under the Department of Labor and Employment in November 24, 1996, six days after the union members wore black armbands and staged a picket. But instead of obeying the Memorandum of Agreement it signed with the union, on January 11 Nestle instead dismissed the officials (10) of the union and suspended 200 members of the union allegedly for breaking the company's code of conduct for staging the picket which led to the settlement. Two days afterwards, the union went on strike.
This strike has continued up to the present in spite of harasssment by the management and police forces. The federation Ilaw Buklod ng Manggagawa (IBM) and the Kilusang Mayo Uno labor center have launched a boycott campaign against Nestle products in support of the strike. Other sectors and organizations like the Promotion for Church People's Response, the League of Filipino Students and Bagong Alyansang Makabayan have conducted support activities at the picket line.
Another celebrated case of union-busting is that of Rubberworld Philippines, the manufacturer and distributor of Adidas shoes and sportswear which hires more than 5,000 workers affiliated to the militant KMU and later BMP. But starting 1991 the company started a retrenchment program and phased out three out of five plants resulting in the lay-off of 2,300 workers. While management claimed financial losses as the reason, the fact remains that the company actually subcontracted its production both for local and export and diversified its investments. Rubberworld finally closed shop and shifted production to smaller plants such as Rubberland with 400 workers in 1996. All of Rubberland's workers are agency-hired contractuals (through EC Dynamics Manpower Development) and receive lower than the legal minimum.
Another case is that of Marquee Mills which produces high quality shirts (Ralph Lauren) and employees 150 workers. The company refused to give in to union demands, which included implementation of legislated wage increases. Instead the company sneaked out its production after it acquired a customs bonded warehouse and three months thereafter locked out its workers. The workers are on a marathon strike trying to hold out while the company has successfully continued its operations elsewhere.
The establishment of export processing zones and other similar industrial estates has been welcomed not only by foreign investors but also by existing companies because of its avowed anti-union policy. This phenomenon was started in the province of Cavite by its governor Remulla by the turn of the decade when the trade unions in the region suffered from internal problems. Existing unions were busted, strikes were violently broken and union organizers were harassed including three cases where organizers were missing or summarily executed.
For example, when workers of Basic Chemicals and Plastic Inc., (BCPI) in Carmona, Cavite who were affiliated with ALU-TUCP attempted to go on strike, Gov. Remulla immediately went to the picketline within the hour after the workers declared their strike and told the workers to remove their picketline, "or else". The strike was aborted and the workers who participated were dismissed from their jobs.
This avowed undemocratic policy is now in place even in other zones, especially in the Subic special economic zone. Unionists are harassed making it difficult to continue organizing. For example, the offices of the AMBA union alliance in the Mariveles Export Processing Zone in Bataan was bombed a few years ago in an effort to terrorize unionists. Because of this avowed policy, it is also easier to factories to bust unions in the early stages -- firing workers suspected of union organizing with the support of zone authorities. This was the case of Eastar, a Korean-owned sweater manufacturer in the Cavite export processing zone.
According to the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights, a total 80 cases of violations occurred in 1996 involving 2,436 workers. These included a murder and an attempted murder of unionists, a frustrated massacre of 26 workers and the arrest of 253 workers. There were 25 cases of assault of the picketlines involving 1,338 victims. For 1997, 16 have already been arrested, one was abducted and 51 escaped an attempt at massacre. Assaults and grave threats and coercions of unionists is common, victimizing 1,484 workers and unionists in 1997.
Incomes have not improved as a result of liberalization. On the contrary, wages have remained low as the current PhP165 daily minimum wage is equivalent in real terms to P65.42 in 1988 prices, almost unchanged as the minimum wage then was P64. But this minimum wage compares unfavorably to the cost of living (for an average family of six), which has reached PhP381.12 in 1996 from PhP151.12 in 1988.
The absence of a living wage, or consistently depressed wages below the already low cost of living standards in the Philippines is typical of an underdeveloped country and is the source for monopoly capital's superprofits. Besides depressed minimum wage standards, additional profits are made because the majority of enterprises (mostly made up of small and medium sized companies employing up to 50 persons, but including the large corporations) do not implement the minimum wage.
Companies are legally able to evade the minimum wage law by hiring workers on a piece-rate basis or by hiring workers as "trainees" or "apprentices". Some industries also apply for exemptions on the basis of distressed status like the garments factories. On the other hand, companies also flaunt the law by hiring casuals or contractuals who are afraid to complain of being paid less than the level mandated by law. According to the government's nationwide official survey on violations of labor standards in February 1997, minimum wage was the most violated labor standard, followed by other wage standards like the 13th month pay and remittance of employees contributions to the Social Security System.
In a study of garments companies, only seven out of 16 enterprises paid the mandated minimum wages. But these seven enterprises base these wages on quotas, subjecting them to deduction for workers who lag behind.
The government has consistently opposed labor agitation for wage increases. After the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship, the strength of the militant trade unions led by KMU resulted in a series of nationwide strike campaigns that won wage increases for all workers. The government responded towards the end of the 1980's by enacting into law a new, more repressive labor code and a system of regionalized wage boards that preempted worker agitation by enacting nominal wage increases on a regional basis.
The only recourse for labor to raise wages beyond the grossly inadequate minimum would be through collective bargaining, marginalizing the majority of workers which do not or cannot form unions because of size of company or job status. But even those enterprises which have unions, a substantial number of the work force or in many cases the majority of the workers are not eligible for member in the union and are not covered by the economic benefits and wage increases from collective bargaining.
With the advent of semi-processing export industries like garments and electronics subconductors in the 1970s and 1980s, women have increasingly become wage and salary earners, in many cases comprising the majority of employees, especially for enterprises in export processing zones. Women are extremely marginalized and constitute the majority of the unemployed. They are employed only because the company is in need of persons who are capable of repetitive and meticulous work like in electronics subcontractors and garments like embroidery. In other situations, they have to be more qualified and have to work harder in order to keep their jobs. And where they have jobs, women suffer from double work as they juggle employment and house work.
Child labor can be found mostly in the context of family labor. Many factories employ minors, but the law allows employment of children from 15 years and above. Younger children can be found in subcontractors where they perform simple tasks such as revising, or removing stray threads/yarn. They are paid P1 per sweater.
But many subcontractors also hire children for simple embroidery such as hemming. This is mostly done not in factories but in cases where subcontractors put out work to homes.
For the Philippines, the main issues for workers struggle are living wages, end to union busting, end to flexible hiring schemes and other unfair labor practices, and repeal of the labor code to realize the workers' right to strike fully. But yellow unionism and the predominance of labor aristocrats further marginalizes the militant section of an already marginalized unionized sector of wage earners. The combination of the labor code which has put a legal straightjacket on the right to strike, the harassments and violent oppression of workers and unionists, and the discordant reformist voices of yellow unionist and labor aristocrats has given capital a heyday in union busting, keeping low wages frozen and restructuring industry along the lines of neo-liberal management policies.
Because of the difficulties, the weakening and limited maneuver faced by the unions because of anti-worker Labor Code, dramatic reduction in legally unionizable employees and the internal weakening of the unions, there has been a general decline in the number of strikes since its peak in 1986 with 561 companies involved.
The government's goal is to achieve industrial peace as a necessary component to globalization. It has been promoting this through a combination of repression discussed above and labor compromise through various schemes like voluntary arbitration and tripartism where labor is coopted to participate in inherently unequal and unjust terms. As a result labor is pacified and loses its basic rights, or is disempowered from utilizing these rights and gains nothing in the process.
The only recourse for labor is to face their problem of low wages head on --strengthen trade union solidarity, expand organizing of labor into unions and other forms of organizations and advance the militant struggle for workers rights and welfare, and to end imperialist globalization.
Because of the beleaguered situation of labor under globalization, solidarity becomes very important as it contributes to the urgent effort to alleviate workers' condition and to realize workers' rights. And just as militant struggle to organize unions and realize their economic and political demands is the key labor response to globalization, solidarity in militant action is also the most important kind of support to the labor sector.
Workers strikes and campaign in Philippines regularly receive support from workers and solidarity organizations abroad. For example, the landmark PLDT strike discussed above received moral support from the Philippine-Australia Union Link, the telecommunications branch of the CEPU of Australia, and the Union of Working people in Greece among others. Some labor unions and solidarity organizations abroad sponsor the allowance of full-time organizers of progressive trade unions in the Philippines.
On the other hand, progressive Philippine trade unions are active in militant solidarity to their brothers and sisters overseas like the protest rally launched by the KMU at the Australian embassy in support of the Trade and Labor Council of Western Australia campaign against anti-worker legislation in Parliament and the picket-rally at the South Korean embassy to denounce the arrest of labor leaders and trade union repression in South Korea. Negotiations are being made to conduct coordinated campaigns in the Philippines and Canada regarding the environmental degradation due to Canadian mining company practices in the Philippines.
forwarded by: -----------------------------------------------------
B A Y A N
Bagong Alyansang Makabayan or New Patriotic Alliance
Room 213, FMSG Building,1823 E. Rodriguez Avenue corner
New York Street, Cubao,
Quezon City, Philippines
Tel/Fax: (63-2) 721-10-21 local 252/229
Email: