Church people team up with workers to ‘live out’ social doctrines

By MARYA SALAMAT
Bulatlat.com

MANILA – Members of the church celebrated the feast of St. Joseph the Worker last week in a conference with various workers’ groups in the National Capital Region. According to its conveners, this regional conference is a fruit of the first national conference of the Church-People Workers Solidarity (CWS) held last September in Cebu City.

The NCR conference is “our dream come true” and is good news, said Jaro Auxiliary Bishop Gerardo A. Alminaza. Last year, they formed the Church People and Workers Solidarity as a permanent organization “to serve as an instrument to assist workers in their struggle for dignity and rightful recognition as partners in the pursuit of peace and progress in the country,” as Bishop Alminaza reminded the gathered church people and workers.

For Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio G. Tagle, this gathering of church people, workers, labor advocates and members of civil society organizations expresses “oneness and solidarity of all the groups represented around the common goal of recognizing and promoting the dignity of work and workers.”

For workers’ dignity, in 2011 the CWS expressed support for the passage of P125 across-the-board wage hike. It has also called on the government to regulate the oil industry “to moderate the greed of oil companies.”

The CWS has also criticized the legalization of contractualization which, in its “inherent immorality,” allows capital “to violate the workers’ basic right to security.”

The Church People-Workers Solidarity statement of covenant forged in their first national conference reacted against the trend today of regular employees being “terminated summarily and then coerced to re-apply as contractual laborers together with new applicants, in total disregard of their many years of service.”

Last week’s regional conference of CWS-NCR also heard testimonies of workers on issues ranging from wage and contractualization, informal work, right to freedom of association, women’s rights, occupational health and safety and labor migration.

Workers from Pepsi recounted how, in their workplace, workers have been employed as contractual for ten years but up to now they are still fighting to become regular workers. They said they are also in talks with fellow workers from other softdrink manufacturing companies. “Our capitalists may be rivals in business, but we workers are in the same boat and uniting together,” said Ferdie Dilay, president of workers’ union in Pepsi.

The contractual janitors of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines also shared how they have been working with PUP for more than a decade now but each time the university changes its maintenance agency, their jobs are always put at risk. The said contractual janitors are presently on strike. They are demanding reinstatement as the newly arrived agency refused to absorb them despite the union’s previous agreement with the PUP administration.

Gloria Bongon, president of the employees union in Bleustar, a shoe-manufacturing company, cried while sharing to the conference their experience at resisting sexual harassment, establishing and asserting their union and job security.

Antonio Perez, president of the ABS-CBN IJM Workers Union, shared that until now, despite a labor department decision that gave the media giant the go signal to allow the conduct of certification election among its employees (and to recognize these employees as their employees), there is still no election to this day. (See update.)

The CWS may be a joint effort of workers, advocates and church people, but it is also, for the Church, an effort to “live out its social doctrines that the Church needs to side with the poor and the marginalized,” said Fr. Jo Dizon, co-convenor of CWS National.

More than 150 church-people, workers and advocates joined the conference. They comprise the priests and lay from six dioceses in Metro Manila, representatives from the ICM Sisters, Missionaries of Jesus, Order of Preachers, Urban Missionaries and CBCP-Nassa. Workers came from labor unions in Pepsi, Toyota, Nippon-Promac, Bleustar, ABS-CBN, Unimart and Pentagon. There were also representatives from bus and jeepney drivers, sidewalk vendors and the contractual janitors of PUP who are currently on strike. Members of Migrante International also attended.

Bishop Alminaza expressed hopes about their resolve to organize similar conferences in various regions of the country, “in order to reach out to more church people and workers and thus concretely live out the Catholic Social Teachings which until now are still considered “the best kept secret of the Catholic Church.” (https://www.bulatlat.com)

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