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Labor movement’s many challenges

Tomorrow, May 1, we join the rest of the civilized world in celebrating International Labor Day.

As usual, we expect the government, private companies, mass media, and other social institutions in the country to extol the qualities of Filipino labor and to nominally recognize the standard issues of the working class.

We extend our warm greetings and utmost support to the leaders, organizers, and activists of the Filipino working class movement for persisting in their struggle to pursue workers’ basic rights for decent wages, job security, humane working conditions, social benefits, and union rights.

Even as we renew our appreciation of the historical gains achieved so far by the Filipino labor movement, we realize that the current economic crisis and pro-globalization policies have greatly eroded many of these gains particularly in the form of legislated and collectively-negotiated benefits.

The persistent demand for a legislated increase in minimum wages, specifically KMU’s P125 across-the-board increase in daily minimum wage, has remained unacted on by Congress. In fact, its main proponent at the Lower House, Anakpawis Rep. Crispin ‘Ka Bel’ Beltran, is now GMA’s political prisoner. Across the country, unions are increasingly on the defensive – their leaders persecuted and fired from work if not hunted down and “salvaged,” their legal status undermined by worsening contractualization and stringent anti-union laws.

More than this, we must continue to remind ourselves that more than 50 percent of the country’s labor force do not even formally count as workers with rights guaranteed by the Labor Code, since they are statistically left out. They suffer the worst types of labor exploitation as seasonal farm workers, odd-jobbers, domestic helpers, unpaid family workers, and as housewives.

Here in Northern Luzon, we see them everyday in the streets and commercial areas of urban and provincial town centers. They may not be a promising lot to mainstream labor federations since they are dispersed, hard to organize, and difficult to fit into CBA standards.

Yet they are a latent political force. Thus, this May 1, let us not forget them. It remains a big challenge to the Filipino labor movement to reach and organize these much wider ranks of working people. #

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