The
Hazards of Toiling for the Cojuangcos
A lost foot, a lost job
and a threat to lose his home. This tale of a sugar mill worker at the
Central Azucarera de Tarlac brings to fore the miserable conditions that
bug the work force of Luzon’s largest sugar refinery.
BY DABET CASTAÑEDA
Bulatlat
LOST: Forty-year-old Fernando Alcibar
lost his right foot at the CAT conveyor
belt in February 1999.
Photo by Dabet Castañeda |
It was 30 minutes
past midnight on Feb. 7, 1999 when
Fernando Alcibar lost his foot while on duty at the Mill and Boiler
department of the Central Azucarera de Tarlac (CAT). CAT is part of the
sprawling Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, 120 kms north of Manila, and site of a violent strike
dispersal last Nov. 16.
Hacienda Luisita, a
6,443-ha sugar plantation and milling company, is owned by the family of
former President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino.
According to the
company’s injury report, Alcibar heard an unusual sound on the head end of
the Wet Bagasse Conveyor No. 2. When checked where the sound was coming
from, “he was off-balanced and accidentally stepped on a corroded catwalk
structural which gave way. His right foot hang inside the drag conveyor
and was caught by the moving channel slots against a structural beam which
resulted to a severe injury.”
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Alcibar, in an
interview with Bulatlat in his home in Sitio (sub-village) Obrero,
Barangay (village) Sentral, said two of his co-workers helped him up and
brought him to the nearby St. Martin de Porres Hospital (SMDPH), a small
hospital inside the Cojuangco-owned hacienda. The hospital facilities were
inadequate to manage Alcibar’s injury and he was immediately transferred
to the Central Luzon Doctors’ Hospital in Tarlac
City.
The former conveyor
belt operator was sidelined for a year after the first operation. His
wound would not heal however and he was operated again in 2000.
Despite his
disability, he tried to get back to work after his operation. But on Dec.
5, 2000, Alcibar received a memo from CAT management saying he was being
“terminated due to sickness.”
Alcibar received a
monthly pension of P5,000 (US$89.28 at US$1=PhP56) from the Employees
Compensation Commission and the Social security System for only three
years and eight months because he was declared as only partially disabled.
When his pension ended last year, he had to depend on his earnings from
his jeepney which he bought from his gratuity pay of P188,825.
Despite his handicap,
Alcibar himself drives his jeepney since getting a driver would mean less
income. Alcibar uses his left foot and plies the Tarlac-Burot route
everyday, enabling him to feed his family and send his children to school.
Hazard prone
Alcibar’s case is not
isolated. Romeo Sarate, a SMDPH staff nurse and CAT Labor Union (CATLU)
officer representing the Medical Service Department, said most of the
sugar mill workers suffer from work-related injuries and diseases. The
most common case is pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB), of which around 25-30
percent of the workforce is inflicted with due to exposure to bagasse,
the waste of sugar canes after the sugar has been extracted.
Although PTB cases
can be cured within three to six months of oral chemotherapy, Sarate said
most cases are not cured even after being given triple or quadruple
regimens. In such cases, the illness is no longer an ordinary lung disease
but may already be bagassosis, a respiratory disorder due to the
inhalation of the dust of bagasse.
To make the situation
worse, these cases are not classified as work-related. The afflicted
workers are thus forced to spend their own money for medication since the
company only allows P100 a month medical benefit for union members and P50
a month for their dependents – not even enough for a full dosage of the
ordinary antibiotics. Any amount exceeding this would be deducted from
their salary.
Medicines in the
plantation’s hospital are free only when the patients are confined but
since PTB patients take their regimen at home, they are not entitled to
it.
Meanwhile, the
hospital recorded almost 15 cases of death from blood-related diseases
since 2001. Sarate said this is due to the workers’ exposure to chemicals.
He added though that these diseases could be detected only at its final
stages.
Sarate said there
were cases like Alcibar’s in which workers were terminated due to sickness
while still undergoing treatment due to a work-related disease. Once
terminated, the workers lose their medical benefits from the company.
Insufficient
The SMDPH has only 35
beds. Ninety percent of its patients are usually farm workers from the
sugarcane plantation and 10 percent are sugar mill workers.
In the mid-1980s, the
hospital started hiring contractual doctors, removing the regular doctors.
It now only has 29 nurses and six moonlighting doctors to attend to the
20,000-strong Hacienda community (farm and mill workers and their
families). Each doctor attends to 40 to 60 patients a day.
“Syempre,
pagdating sa hapon, pagod na ang doctor. Wala ng quality kasi hindi na
nache-check mabuti ang pasyente”(By afternoon, the doctor is already
tired. There is decreased quality of service, the patients are no longer
checked thoroughly), he said. He added that some of their doctors have no
specialization that may result in wrong diagnosis or under-dosage of
prescribed medicine.
He cited the case of
a patient who had gastric cancer and given oral therapy by one of SMDPH
doctors. The patient went back to work but became sick again. When
transferred to the Far
Eastern University (FEU, owned by
Josephine Cojuangco-Lopa, one of the hacienda’s BoD) in Manila, doctors
found his cancer at its third stage. A doctor from Manila said the patient
suffered due to under-dose of medicines, which made his condition worse.
The patient has since then died.
Demolition
Apart from losing
their jobs from work-related sickness, workers also face losing their
homes.
Late last year, a
village official approached Alcibar and asked him to sign a document
saying he would be paid P30,000 as payment for his house. In turn, he and
his family are to leave as soon as the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway gets
underway.
“Syempre, hindi
ako pumirma” (Of course, I did
not sign), he said adding that he inherited his house from his
grandparents who worked at the hacienda during the Spanish colonial
period.
As stipulated in the
CBA, each sugar mill worker is entitled to a 240-sq.m. homelot, with 1993
as the cut-off date for distribution.
Brgy. Sentral, which
consists of four sitios – Sit, Obrero, Lote and Camarin – and about 2,000
households, would be wiped out due to the land conversion project of the
hacienda. In 1995, the Tarlac provincial government approved a proposal
from the Cojuangcos to use 3,200 hectares of the agricultural land for
roads, residential, recreational and industrial enclaves.
The expressway would
displace at least five of the 10 villages inside the hacienda. The
land-use conversion on the whole would evict 2,500 more sugar farm workers
because it would leave only some 1,000 hectares for the plantation.
Bulatlat
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