Judging from the first six months in office of the Aquino government, there seems to be no relief in sight for workers who have been suffering from record joblessness, runaway prices of basic goods and services, and violent attacks on their democratic rights.
By MARYA SALAMAT
Bulatlat.com
MANILA — In 2010, Filipino workers were treated to glittering promises of change as newly elected President Benigno Aquino III replaced Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in Malacañang. After nearly 10 years of Arroyo’s wage freeze amid economic policies that resulted in continuously rising prices of basic commodities and services, record joblessness, violations of human rights and trade union rights, Aquino’s promises naturally brought hope.
Did the first six months of the Aquino government indicate that he would deliver on his promise of change, especially in the lives and working conditions of the Filipino worker? It appears that the Aquino government is merely continuing Arroyo’s economic and labor policies. Thus, Filipino workers seem perched for early disappointment. If there is any remaining hope, it would have to emanate from their resolve to continuously press for their rights to decent wages and gainful livelihood.
In 2010, the country’s workforce managed to survive largely from their own grit, as “jobless growth” and hunger continue to pervade under Aquino. Worse, some who would have been unemployed if not for their tenaciousness in looking for sources of income — even to the extent of engaging in “vulnerable employment,” for instance the kuliglig drivers — have been facing violent threats to their trade.
“Vulnerable employment” is the proxy term used by the International Labor Organization (ILO) for the informal sector whose “employed” masses work with no assured earnings, no social protection like health insurance, medical benefits, and no unemployment insurance. In the Philippines, it is the informal sector that has been expanding through years of supposed economic growth.
Of the 36 million employed Filipinos in 2010, only 19 million are wage and salary workers. The rest belonged to “own-account,” “self-employed” and “unpaid family workers,” or the ‘employed’ people who are most likely in the informal sector. The number of self-employed workers went up by 757,000 and unpaid family workers by 510,000 in the July 2010 labor force survey. On the other hand, the number of wage and salary workers even fell by 330,000.
Even among the ranks of wage and salary workers, there are also those who fall under the ILO’s category of “vulnerable employment,” or those who comprise the “working poor” because they earn less than $2 a day.
According to IBON, an independent non-government think-tank, there is a problem if the economy is consistently able to register growth and deliver corporate profits but unable to create enough jobs and raise wages. The situation in the Philippines, Ibon said, highlights the need for urgent reforms in the domestic economy that should address this inability to create regular, productive, and gainful jobs.
But if Aquino continues to pursue the same economic programs, which for nearly ten years had generated only these low-quality kinds of employment, the year 2011 promises to be another year of ceaseless struggle against hunger and poverty, lack of decent jobs and livelihood for the country’s workforce. And the poor majority’s democratic rights would remain an illusion.
Demand for Immediate Economic Relief
This early, Aquino’s drive for greater privatization through more “public-private partnerships” already threatens Filipinos with higher prices. There are impending increases in transport costs and prices of goods as an “introductory” 200-percent toll fee hike await the users of South Luzon Expressway (SLEx) come Jan 1. “The Toll Regulatory Board (TRB) decision will make life harder for millions of wage-earners, traders, public utility drivers, operators and truckers,” warned the Taxpayers’ Unity vs Toll Hike in SLEX.
The “introductory” increases do not yet include the full proposal for fee hikes by the private operator of SLEx, and the 40-percent increase, at least, in the toll fees for the Skyway, which also connects to the SLEx but is operated by another private corporation.
Another hike awaits millions of railway commuters as the government deliberates on the amount of increases to be imposed on the fares for the Light Railway Transit (LRT) and the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) even as private operators of the railways reportedly continue to rake in profits. The government said this week that the minimum fare would most likely be raised from P10 to P18 ($0.227 to $0.41). “It is reasonable to expect that the fees would be increased on the first quarter of 2011,” transportation and communications secretary Ping de Jesus said this week.
The Aquino government, through DOTC secretary Ping de Jesus, also justified the looming hikes in toll fees and in the railways as “reasonable” and needed to ensure that investors would come in for such projects. But protesters such as the TUTOL-SLEx and lawyer Ernesto Francisco have questioned the seeming anomalies behind such hikes, as well as the government’s seeming deafness toward their arguments.
Meanwhile, prices of rice, sugar, wheat and bread, water, electricity and oil products repeatedly increased in 2010. Since the price-setting of oil was deregulated in 1996, prices have spiked 139 times as of June this year, according to Ibon. This month of December alone, oil prices increased three times. All these increases threaten to continue in 2011 as the Aquino government has not yet made any move to repeal the laws or the programs that freely allow these hikes, such as the Downstream Oil Industry Deregulation Law and the Electric Power Industry Reform Act or EPIRA, which deregulated the setting of electricity charges. Worse, in a business summit where Aquino angled for more public-private partnerships, his administration aired various proposals to further assure the profits of investors at the expense of Filipino consumers and taxpayers. Aquino has so far also tried once to increase and expand the Value-Added Tax.
All these price hikes have made the Philippine labor sector’s demand for a legislated wage hike “a debt that is long overdue,” as the alliance Koalisyon ng Progresibong Manggagawa at Mamamayan or KPMM put it. “Our right for a substantial wage hike has long been denied to us, we do not deserve to wait any longer,” said Joselito Ustarez, vice-chairman of Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU).
But the Aquino government is merely replicating the previous Arroyo government’s obstinate refusal to legislate an across-the-board, substantial wage adjustment for all Filipino workers. The proposed bill that was filed from day 1 of the 15th Congress had been scheduled for discussion by the House Committee on Labor and Employment nearly a half-year later, only to be set aside because of the congressmen’s decision to take an early Christmas break.
In 2010, what the workers in Metro Manila got was a “paltry” increase of P22 ($0.50) a day, when the Regional Wage Board finally decided to grant an increase after nearly two years of nothing. The existence of the regional wage boards has been a sore point to progressive organized labor, who pointed to the regional wage boards’ two-decade record as stark evidence that these “were really meant to keep wage increases at the slightest and corporate profits at its highest.”
Indeed, early this year, the policy-making National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC) under the labor department expressed its concern that Philippine labor is “the most expensive” in Southeast Asia, even as their data showed that among 13 countries in Asia and the Pacific, the Philippines particularly the workers in Metro Manila ranked seventh in terms of having the lowest minimum wage. The NWPC did not factor in the higher cost of living in the country. This month, too, even the International Labor Organization’s Global Wage Report showed that workers’ wages in the Philippines have suffered one of the biggest cuts in Asia because of the global crisis.
“The ILO report on wages merely confirms what we workers have been experiencing all along – that what we could buy with our wages has been steadily decreasing,” said Lito Ustarez, KMU vice-chairman. On top of the wage cuts, the purchasing power of the Philippine peso steadily declined in the past decade, so that as of June this year, it is worth only 61 centavos compared to its value in 2000, said Ibon.
“The reduction of workers’ real wages, which is a result of the global crisis, is another reason why the Aquino government should legislate a substantial wage hike immediately. Such an increase will give workers immediate relief from the soaring prices of basic commodities and give them a bigger fraction of what they worked for,” Ustarez added.
Progressive labor groups “fully anticipate the coming new year to bring new hope for the passage of a substantial wage hike bill only because they vow to intensify efforts to push for a legislated wage hike.”
Demand for Jobs and Social Protection
Peoples’ organizations in the Philippines blame the continuing lack of genuine land reform and the implementation of neo-liberal policies in the country as the reasons behind the persistent backwardness of the country’s economy and the resultant joblessness and poverty of majority of Filipinos.
Rural livelihoods, which, based on government data, account for 12.3 million jobs in 2010 have been “greatly undermined by the influx of cheap, heavily subsidized imported food commodities and agricultural goods.” According to Ibon, small Filipino farmers and direct food producers who are already long suffering feudal exploitation stemming from their landlessness are now facing even more bankruptcy and desolation under agricultural liberalization.
But if Filipinos had had any hope of compensating for the lack of rural livelihood through greater government subsidies, it was swiftly dashed during Aquino’s first six months, as his government attempted immediately to abolish these subsidies. En route to privatizing the National Food Authority (NFA), which subsidizes part of the price of rice, the Aquino government has slashed its budget for palay (unhusked rice) procurement for 2011.
Neither is Aquino showing signs of correcting the age-old problem of landlessness. On the contrary, his government’s seeming policy of defending the monopoly of land by big landlords, such as his family who owns the 6,453-hectare Hacienda Luisita, is a sign of “more farmers’ dislocation from haciendas all over the country,” the Anakpawis Partylist said in a statement last week.
Other than agriculture, a significant number of Filipinos worked in the services sector in 2010, which recorded 18.6million employed as of July. Out of the one million net new jobs created, Ibon noted that some 515,000 were in the economy’s lowest earning sectors: agriculture (201,000 jobs), wholesale and retail trade (251,000) and private households (62,000).
“The increase in jobs in agriculture is particularly problematic, considering earlier reports that indicated a 2.5 percent contraction during the third quarter of the year. This implies lower average incomes for workers in the sector,” said Ibon. The average basic pay of wage and salary workers in trade (P258 or $5.415 daily in 2009) and private households (P126 or $2.64) are also way below the national average of P291 ($6.108) .
Employment in the industry sector, which includes manufacturing, increased a bit from 5.1 million to 5.5 million in 2010, based on NSO data. The comparatively tiny share of the sector in the Philippines’ total employment reveals the backwardness of the country’s industry and economy. The nature of jobs it generates further shows how bleak the situation is for workers.
The number of non-regular workers has been steadily increasing in the country. A Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics (BLES) report released early in 2010 pointed to the trend, as it noted that the total number of non-regular workers, which includes casual, seasonal, contractual or project-based workers, and paid apprentices in all non-agricultural establishments, increased by 16.4-percent from 2004 to 2008. After 2008, when the global financial crisis imploded, the number of non-regular workers expectedly ballooned further. Firms cited the crisis for implementing various cost-cutting measures.
A host of Labor Code-stipulated benefits do not apply to non-regular workers. Thus, hiring more non-regular workers lowers the cost of doing business and therefore hikes corporate profits. This kind of “flexibility” in hiring and firing is one of the neoliberal policies under globalization that the Philippine government through the labor department has been helping investors in the country to implement. In the aftermath of the global financial crunch, the labor department has additionally crafted various department orders, which allowed firms to do away with some labor standards such as paying overtime, etc.
The persistent proposals to “dust-off” the country’s current labor code could be traced to attempts to formalize the deregulation of the country’s labor standards. Still, even if none of the contending proposals in congress has been approved, pocket changes are being instituted through various Supreme Court decisions, new laws and the labor department’s orders.
In 2010, the trend of transforming portions, if not all, of an establishment’s workforce into lower-paid non-regular employees was headlined by reputable, profitable companies, such as the Philippine Air Lines (PAL) and ABS-CBN.
A cursory survey of firms in the country reveals that non-regulars work side by side with regulars, at times even outnumbering them more than twice or thrice. Aside from PAL and ABS-CBN, companies have been slashing wages and undercutting unions through redundancy and early retirement programs. Most unions whether affiliated with the progressive KMU or with the government-backed TUCP or “independents” have problems of falling membership and economic benefits as more and more non-regulars are being hired by their employers to perform work previously being done by regular workers.
It is because of this that despite their seeming political differences, Filipino labor leaders could claim or aspire for “unity” to oppose contractualization. In 2011, the drive against this trend of slashing workers’ wages and benefits through downgrading workers’ employment status may push various labor groups into more protest actions, challenging, in the process, the substance of the Aquino government’s promised change.
Demand for Union and Democratic Rights
Aside from rising prices and ignored demands for social justice, the continuing extra-judicial killings and harassments of leaders and members of progressive people’s organizations underscore the absence of a honeymoon period under the new president.
Far from getting rid of the Arroyo government’s infamous counter-insurgency program Oplan Bantay Laya, which regarded organized workers, especially the progressive bloc as enemies of the state and targets for neutralization, the Aquino government even extended it until a new one has been crafted in January.
As a result, five union leaders and members became victims of extra-judicial killings in 2010. Two of them – Edward Panganiban, 27, and Benjamin Bayles, 44— were killed shortly before Aquino was sworn in last June. The other three were killed after Aquino was installed in Malacañang.
Panganiban was secretary of the workers union in Japanese-owned Takata Phils., Inc. in Laguna. Motorcycle-riding men wearing ski masks gunned him down while he was riding his motorcycle on his way to work. His fellow union officers at the Samahang Lakas ng Manggagawa sa Takata (SALAMAT or Association for Workers’s Strength in Takata) immediately accused the military, saying they had begun experiencing military surveillance and receiving threats since they formed their union in 2007.
In an incident, noted a report of the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR), one of these men doing surveillance showed the union president his ID issued by the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP). The intelligence agent said they were just doing their job. Also, during SALAMAT’s campaign for certification election in 2009, the Takata management reportedly held anti-union and anti-communist seminars facilitated by ANAD (Alliance for Nationalism and Democracy), an anti-communist group, which tried to dissuade the workers from voting yes to the union or approaching any of the union leaders.
Less than two weeks later, Benjamin Bayles, 44, organizer of the National Federation of Sugar Workers in Himamaylan City, Negros Occidental, was gunned down also by motorcycle-riding men. Based on the documentation of the CTUHR, the assailants fled to the direction of Kabankalan City, where the police checkpoint later reported that they apprehended two men, each armed with a .45 caliber pistol. They were identified as Roger M. Bahon and Ronnie L. Caurino, “organic” members of the 61st Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Army.
Motorcycle-riding men wearing helmets or masks later separately gunned down two teachers on the same day in July in Masbate, Bicol. Mark Francisco, 27, was member of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) while Edgar Fernandez was a public school teacher. Witnesses reportedly noted that Francisco’s killers wore camouflaged uniforms frequently worn by soldiers.
Last month in Laguna, the same province where Panganiban of Takata Phils Inc was killed five months ago, Carlo Rodriguez, 41, union president of Nagkakaisang Lakas ng Manggagawa sa Calamba Water District, was killed also by men riding motorcycles.
Until now, no suspect in these killings has been identified even if these killings follow a seeming pattern wherever in the Philippines it was committed. So far the Aquino government does not show any intention of investigating these killings.
It appears that workers would have to suffer the same risk of violent attacks as they assert their legal right to organize, bargain for decent wages and humane working conditions, and articulate their positions on important national matters affecting them.
New unions continue to face hardships on the way to legal recognition. In the first half of the year, the number of newly registered workers’ associations reached 1,421, lower by 323 compared to the same period last year, according to the Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics (BLES). Workers associations listed with the labor department cover only 781,000 members all over the country, or roughly less than four percent of all employed wage and salary workers.
Some unions, like the ABS-CBN IJM workers’ union, are still grappling with repressive measures being instituted by corporations such as mass termination. Others are striving to avert getting thoroughly whittled down by redundancy and contractualization schemes. In the first half of 2010, regional offices of the labor department reported that more than a thousand establishments resorted to permanent closure or retrenchment, displacing 17,042 workers.
In Southern Tagalog, workers had organized various alliances to confront these problems, such as an alliance against illegal termination. Other workers’ unions are struggling against being virtually wiped out, as companies relocated to other areas and took new, non-unionized, non-regular workers. The workers of Triumph underwear, for example, accused their employers of having done such a runaway shop. Others, such as the unions of port workers and stevedores in Manila North Harbor, are currently struggling to regain their union and their collective bargaining agreements after the pier was privatized early this year.
Other unions, particularly those in regions outside of Metro Manila, are being harassed and repressed by the military; others such as the union of the Dolefil workers in General Santos were forcibly taken over by management-chosen unions. The union of workers in Nestle, which is still on strike, continues to press the government to enforce Supreme Court rulings ordering the company to go back to the negotiating table to hammer out a collective bargaining agreement with the workers.
Despite the difficulties in conducting a strike and the dwindling number of strikes in the past years, the number of actual strikes rose this year (from four in 2008 and in 2009 to seven as of Nov 2010), involving more workers (from 1,115 and 1,510 in 2008 and 2009 to 2,976 as of Nov 2010). But the labor department has issued at least eight assumption of jurisdiction (AJ) orders, thus continuing the trend begun by the Arroyo government, which issued more AJ orders than the number of actual workers’ strikes.
Assumption of jurisdiction (AJ) orders, notwithstanding, some unions in 2010 had proved yet again that asserting their right to strike could help them achieve their demands for better wages, even if these are fraught with danger.
An independent monitoring of CTUHR in 2010 documented a total of 161 cases of trade union and human rights violations in the country, directly affecting 24,132 union members. It covered various violations of the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, from union-busting to harassments, intervention on trade union affairs, anti-union discrimination and prohibition of the right to strike.
Stronger mass actions, the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) and the Anakpawis partylist insist, remain the workers’ weapon for asserting their rights to decent wages, jobs, rights and livelihood. 
January 3rd, 2011 at 5:02 pm
This article is well-written, very informative. It shines light on the beginning-of-the-year projections of the Aquino regime’s confident claims that “good times” are ahead for ordinary Filipinos. Tell that to the Pinoy commuters who will pay more transit fares or anyone else facing higher costs of living, in terms of food, electricity, gasoline, propane gas, and all other commodities of daily living. Inflation—what better way to charm the birds out of people pockets—much more “unnoticeable” and less confrontational than an outright reduction of wages or “outsourcing/insourcing” of union jobs to private sweatshops.
I invite Bulatlat readers to learn more about Capitalism’s deadly tricks. The following article is an effective antidote to the “Brave New World” of Pnoy (President Benigno S. Aquino III), the economist: http://www.counterpunch.org/cramer12302010.html