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“This is a reflection of the current state of the country’s health workers who endure low wages under a privatized health system.”
The No To Jeepney Phaseout Coalition points to Mar Roxas as one of the prime movers of the jeepney phase out plan when he was still Transportation secretary.
So far, only two units have been delivered in an approved fleet management group. Its machines overheated and conked out in less than one month.
Read also: Drivers vow zero votes to LP, Mar Roxas
Esperidion Cabaltera, president of the MWLU-II-NAFLU-KMU, ascribed their victory to the “unified resoluteness and courage of the workers” who, he said, have long been experiencing injustices in Musahamat.
She entered the National Labor Federation of Labor Unions (NAFLU) as a graduating student doing her practicum for a secretarial course; little did she know then that she would learn more than doing office work.
“The DOLE (Department of Labor and Employment) is sleeping on the case of Musahamat workers and it can no longer pretend that nothing is happening. By being silent, it is being complicit in the apparent campaign to silence the workers in Pantukan by any means possible, including murder.”
The management wants to implement a two-tier wage increase, with only 50 percent being guaranteed and the other half dependent on the company’s and employee’s performance.
'How will we develop our science and technology if the people in this sector are not being given opportunities to develop?'
'The government should look after its S&T (science and technology) workers.'
The Revised Penal Code provides that a quit claim will not affect the criminal liability of the respondents.
“This is like a basketball game, and President Aquino wants to pass this law in the last two minutes of the game.”
Elmer Labog of KMU urged workers to keep organizing and forming or defending their unions, saying the plight of workers won’t improve without their own action and organization, without unions, and without genuinely pro-worker unions in particular.
“We dare Carpio-Morales to investigate the said officials and file charges of reckless imprudence resulting in homicide and physical injury, as well as negligence of duty,”
Violations of workers’ and urban poor people’s civil and political rights intensified in 2015.
Instead of killing off small jeepney manufacturers, operators, the government could help them in acquiring new machines at friendly prices and contracts.
They are also asking instead for government subsidy to allow Filipino jeepney assemblers to modernize the jeepney.
The government-dictated phase out cum modernization program would result in killing of local operators and manufacturers, joblessness for current jeepney drivers, the takeover of big corporations and consequently, higher fares, warned the protesters.
When workers try to exercise their rights to hold mass actions and strikes to secure better wages and working conditions, they are labeled or tagged as communist supporters or trouble makers, are brutally dispersed from their picketline, and are harassed with “trumped up” legal cases.
“For the poor, revolution will never be over. As long as we remain hungry, revolution will go on.”
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