PEASANT AND LABOR
DoLE Figures in Violent Strike Dispersals
(Last of two parts)

The Macapagal-Arroyo administration tried to show-window a strike-free labor to foreign investors and creditors. But its labor policies proved to be costly in 2004: scores of workers killed and hundreds injured and arrested. 

By Dabet Castañeda
With a report by Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat

Just like her predecessors, President Gloria Mapacagal-Arroyo’s pro-investment labor economic agenda sought to maintain “industrial peace” and wage freeze policies. These policies were continued in 2004 parallel to the continuance of pro-globalization and structural adjustment programs that include the privatization of government-owned and –controlled corporations (GOCCs), labor contractualization and others.

Macapagal-Arroyo’s draconian measures – faithfully implemented by her controversial labor secretary, Patricia Sto. Tomas – sought to quell labor unrest at a time when the country was reeling from a financial crisis while the workers’ unrelenting demands for wage increase, job security and the like remained unheeded. Dissatisfaction in the labor front also spread to tens of thousands of government employees. Their own demands for salary hike and a stop to mass layoffs fell on deaf ears even as top state bureaucrats and political allies of the president were facing charges of graft and corruption.

Representatives of organized labor told Bulatlat that the Macapagal-Arroyo administration used Marcos-vintage anti-labor policies just so it could show a strike-free industry to foreign investors and multinational credit institutions. During the year, the implementation of the labor department’s assumption of jurisdiction (AJ) policy in many labor-industry disputes throughout the country resulted in the death of many workers and injuries to several others.

Citing its own documentation, the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) revealed that since 2001 out of 132 incidents of strike dispersals by company guards, police and military personnel, 85 were directly connected to the enforcement of AJ.

Most recent of these was the dispersal operation against the picket of thousands of plantation and mill workers at the Hacienda Luisita on Nov. 16 where seven strikers were shot dead and another was slain a few weeks later. Using her AJ powers, Labor Secretary Sto. Tomas deputized hundreds of anti-riot policemen and SWAT teams from all over Central Luzon and nearly a thousand soldiers from the Northern Luzon Command (Norcom) in Tarlac City to break up the farm workers’ picket.

Before the Tarlac massacre, 80 striking workers of Oxford Philippines, Inc. in Marilao, Bulacan were seriously injured when policemen attacked their picket line dawn of Sept. 9. More than 100 workers and their supporters lost their possessions while 42 others were arrested and detained, CTUHR said.

On Oct. 15, a picket of striking workers at the General Milling Corporation in Barrio Ugong, Pasig City was violently dispersed by SWAT-trained company guards. Fifteen were hurt in the dispersal.

AJ was also used against striking employees of the giant chain of shopping malls ShoeMart and hotel strikes.

There were reports that even without an AJ, police would intervene in a strike. In March this year at the Tritan Bus Company, seven strikers who were laid off were arrested and detained by police who also fired their guns and threw tear gas to break the picket line.

National interest

Art. 263 (g) of the Labor Code provides that the labor secretary “may assume jurisdiction over a labor dispute that is in the national interest and may call on law enforcement agencies to assure compliance with lawful orders.” Striking workers are also under orders to go back to work.

The AJ power, however, is a remnant of a presidential decree issued by President Ferdinand Marcos under martial law in a bid to ban labor strikes. This provision, Amado Gat. Inciong, a former labor undersecretary said, is now dead making AJ “illegal.”

The reason, Inciong told a Senate investigation on the Hacienda Luisita massacre in November, why the labor department still uses it is that it has not been stricken off the statute books by post-Marcos presidents. “The assumption of jurisdiction is tantamount to compulsory bargaining,” he said. “This is incompatible with the 1987 Constitution which upholds the principle of collective bargaining.”

In a House testimony mid-December, Daisy Arayo, CTUHR executive director, said the AJ virtually legitimizes the violation of workers’ labor rights. Workers have the right to strike but this is being transgressed by the labor secretary’s exercise of AJ, she said.

In the course of staging strikes and fighting for fair collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), organized workers led by Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU or May First Movement) and migrant groups called for the ouster of Sto. Tomas. They also called for the junking of anti-labor policies including AJ and, to a minimum, the overhaul of the labor code.

Wage increase demand

Uniting the workers once more was their renewed call for a wage increase and against joblessness.

On May 1, organized and militant workers stepped up their campaign for an immediate and legislated nationwide across-the-board minimum wage increase of P125, the same amount that they had been fighting for since 1999 during the Estrada presidency. Joining them were unionized government employees, public school teachers and hospital workers who were demanding an immediate salary increase of P3,000 or more.

Unprecedented unemployment

By mid-year, 11 million Filipinos were either out of work or were otherwise not working enough for a decent living – nearly two million more than in April 2003. The 11 million jobless included five million who are totally unemployed and six million underemployed. This translates to almost 14 percent unemployment rate compared to April 2003’s 12.2 percent – the worst in 50 years.

During the year, the gap between daily minimum wage and the value of basic daily requirements grew even wider. In nominal terms, the daily wage was P250 in the National Capital Region (NCR, where it used to be P194 five years earlier); it was even lower in the provinces.

In 2004, the daily cost of living in the NCR rose to P594 from P383.30 in national average and P455.74 in the NCR five years earlier. While a family of six in Metro Manila should have a monthly income of P17,820, the minimum wage earner could only earn at most P6,600 monthly. Despite limited but nominal increases, all minimum wage earners throughout the country could not make ends meet. In the NCR alone, even three minimum wage earners were not enough for a family of six to survive. 

It was far worse in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) where, statistically speaking, a family of six needed eight wage earners in order to live decently. Reason: The daily minimum wage rate in the region remained unchanged at P140 since 1998, making it the lowest in the entire country. Yet, the ARMM has the highest family living wage requirement, according to the National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC). In February 2004, a family of six needed P748 daily to meet food and non-food requirements or P22,440 every month. Considering that a minimum wage earner could only earn a gross monthly income of P3,080 (assuming that he or she worked for 22 days in one month), something like eight minimum wage earners were needed to meet the needs of a family of six!

Clearly, the income earned by an average Filipino family today is miserably short of what even the World Bank (WB) estimates as the poverty threshold: $1 a day per individual or, in Philippine standards, P387.70 a day for a family of six. In the NCR, the daily wage falls short of the WB poverty threshold by P138. Bulatlat

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