* A statement at the highest level of the government instructing all government actors to make special efforts to ensure that their actions do not infringe upon the basic civil liberties of trade unionists.
High Hopes
In response to the proposals, the DOLE expects help from the ILO mission in improving the country’s compliance to labor standards, to help everyone “find ways to address problems and gaps in the application of Convention 87.” This convention refers to the freedom of association and protection of the right to organize which the Philippines ratified in 1953.
Labor Undersecretary Rosalinda Baldoz agreed with the ILO team’s proposed “continuing education” for the DOLE. “The labor department needs a lot of updating,” Baldoz said.
On the other hand, the progressive labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement) said that “while the government’s repressive and labor-related apparatuses badly need trainings on trade union rights,” they hope the ILO mission would craft “recommendations that will push for justice in relation to trade-union rights violations and that will help solve the issue at the level which matters, the level of government policies and legislation.”
For the labor group, the ILO mission’s statement “essentially, but politely, points to the Philippine government and its apparatuses as the perpetrators of violations of trade union rights in the country.”
They thus feel “encouraged” to look forward to “stronger and more fool-proof recommendations from the mission in March 2010,” when the campaign for the 2010 national elections would likely be in full swing.
KMU hopes the incoming ILO reports will help “foil violations of trade union rights” that usually mar elections in the country. Also, they hope that it will help pressure the country’s next president and national leaders to craft policies that will uphold workers’ rights.
Final Report After ILO Assessment
“We’ve come, gathered information; we’re going to submit (our report) to the higher supervisory bodies for assessment. We’ve completed our job as far as this mission is concerned,” Doumbia-Henry said during their briefing.
But the ILO team declined to divulge yet the contents of their findings, nor talk about their impressions on the “allegations,” saying it was their job to first transmit the facts and data they gathered to ILO supervisory bodies, who in turn will examine it and make an assessment in their meetings in November-December 2009 and March 2010.
Specifically, the mission’s findings and how it was examined would come out in the report of ILO’s Committee on Experts, which assesses a country’s application of labor standards, in February 2010, while the Committee on Freedom of Association and the Protection of the Right to Organize Convention will come out with its report in March of 2010.
Contradictory Statements
The ILO is the only tripartite body in the UN composed of government, workers and employers. It expectedly has to contend with disparate interests and forces.
The Arroyo government has stalled for two years the ILO’s “invitation” to accept a high-level mission that would investigate charges of impunity of harassments, abductions and extra-judicial killings of workers and unionists. In an International Labor Conference hosted by the ILO in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007, then labor secretary Arturo Brion asked the ILO to dismiss the complaints filed by the KMU, saying the KMU is engaged in “forum shopping and other sinister designs.”
As the ILO mission finally made it to the Philippines this year, it said in its concluding press conference that it was “often confronted by contradictory statements concerning violence against trade unionists and the sufficiency of the efforts made by the government to ensure that workers may exercise their trade union rights in a climate free from fear.”
Though they refused to elaborate pending the report and assessment of ILO supervisory bodies, they explained that the contradictory statements revolve more on efforts being made to investigate and prosecute, as well as on perspectives about the killings. That the killings and disappearances actually happened were not in dispute.
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