The pandemic only compounded the already dismal status of occupational health and safety in the country. Workers are either thrusted into work-from-home setups, forced to risk exposure to Covid-19 in their traditional workplaces, or retrenched altogether.
The recent string of harassment and attacks are meant to “silence workers in the lead up to Labor Day.”
Many dismissed security guards had been working for UP for at least a decade, with some serving for as long as 23 years.
Providing due social protection would have contributed to keeping people from leaving their homes but urban poor group Kadamay said the government’s financial aid has been “slow and too little.” They noted that the $20-aid per individual is a far cry from the $206 that progressive groups are demanding.
“Unionists are not terrorists. Terrorists do not fight for wages, decent conditions, and workers’ rights. Terrorists are those who intimidate, arrest, and kill people who stand up for justice and the common good.”
Amid increasing prices of staple goods and a stricter lockdown in place, workers group called the labor department's rejection of a P100-emergency wage relief petition “heartless.”
PAMANTIK-KMU has stated before that the Duterte administration is specifically targeting labor activists and unionists. These attacks, the group claims, intensified since the start of lockdown due to COVID-19 on March 17, 2020.
The Hanes plant in Laguna closed in October 2020 supposedly 'to prevent further losses,' leaving over a thousand of its employees, mostly women, jobless.
Federation of government employees unions COURAGE said the dismissal of 60 employees violated the constitutional and legal rights of government employees to security of tenure.
“For many of us, this is our only source of income. We hope that the UP administration can find a way to address the situation before Christmas.”
Providing workers with their “bare minimum government mandated benefits” is not enough to solve the crisis workers are facing.
Workers have been infuriated by the callous treatment they’ve received in their workplaces. But many of them recognized that the most surefire way to get their employers to provide the protection they needed was through collective action.
"Workers’ groups and advocates have not been remiss in making concrete and constructive proposals to the government, but it has been deaf and blind to such proposals.”
“In the five years that the union has existed, it has succeeded in the struggle for regularization when the workers went on strike in 2017, sorted out the union fund after the previous leadership left nothing, conducted multiple series of educational discussions to help the workers understand their rights, its leaders have studied how to best run the union in order to serve its workers, and advanced the struggle for livable wages and benefits through [Collective Bargaining Agreements].”
As the world grapples with the continuously unfolding crises in public health, economy, and food security, fishing communities face exacerbated hunger, job insecurity, and uncertainty of survival.
Aside from the complainants, the NLRC decision bolstered the rest of the contractual ABS-CBN workers’ demands for regularization.
They had no income for two months and received no aid from government. When they held a protest demanding government to allow them to earn a living, they were arrested and detained.
"The government placed workers lives in the hands of private employers who prioritize profit over workers' health and safety. It has placed workers' lives in the hands of small employers who do not have the necessary resources."
“This is a clear attack on the democratic rights of unionists and workers who are fighting for legitimate rights.”
The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE)’s Bureau of Workers Concerns (BWSC) has so far given P1,000 cash subsidy for 49,267 sugar workers, or only seven percent of the 700,000 sugar workers in the country.
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