Prior to the specter of a U.S. recession, the Arroyo government had been making much of the historically unprecedented but unsustainable appreciation of the peso. She’s been crediting it to her fiscal managers and “good economic fundamentals.” But Labog says these economic fundamentals cannot be good if they are hurting the very people who should have been benefiting from these.
BY MARYA G. SALAMAT
Contributed to Bulatlat
LABOR WATCH
Vol. VIII, No. 1, February 3-9, 2008
“Gloria Arroyo’s ‘economic boom’ is not only not felt by the people, it’s actually even damaging the people’s jobs and livelihood,” KMU chair Elmer “Bong” Labog lamented last week. He said thousands of workers are now losing regular jobs and benefits they’ve struggled to gain for years as many firms are either closing shop, or terminating workers to hire more contractuals.
Ironically, said Labog, the employers’ reasons for kicking their regular workers out are the same as Arroyo’s touted signs of booming economy. Oft-repeated, said Labog, are the strong peso and falling dollar. And beneath these, he added, is “the employers’ drive for ‘greater competitiveness’ through lower wages and more ‘flexibility’ in (mis)treating the workers.”
Prior to the specter of a U.S. recession, the Arroyo government had been making much of the historically unprecedented but unsustainable appreciation of the peso. She’s been crediting it to her fiscal managers and “good economic fundamentals.”
But Labog says these economic fundamentals cannot be good if they are hurting the very people who should have been benefiting from these. “Most Filipino families are feeling the pinch of worsening poverty – hardly a boom,” said Labog.
“If there’s something soaring high in the nation’s vital stats that Gloria Arroyo should face up to, it’s the unprecedented rates of unemployment, dip in real income, belt-tightening and desperation driving our workforce to menial jobs here and abroad,” said Labog.
Contracting employment
The militant Kilusang Mayo (KMU) has been in existence for more than twenty-six years, but it counts as members some local unions who were two to three decades old already, with some as old as five decades as a member federation, the National Federation of Labor Unions (NAFLU), had turned 50 last year. Most of KMU’s older local unions are in either import-substituting or export-oriented companies or both.
“These companies are not your run-of-the-mill, fly-by-night companies,” said Labog. He described some of these companies as part of the top 5,000 corporations in the country. “But at present they’re either closing down or downscaling their operations more aggressively to take advantage of Arroyo’s import liberalization and cheap labor policy.”
No thanks to Arroyo’s economic fundamentals, big import-substituting firms and transnational corporations with global operational tie-ups are now finding it more profitable to just import their products from another country and dump it into the Philippine market. That, said Labog, is costing the Filipinos jobs.
He said their Drug and Food Alliance is perhaps KMU’s most severely-hit federation. Ajinomoto’s closure late last year is just one of the examples of drug and food workers’ fate.
If not outrightly closing down, some companies are either spinning off entire departments to avail of more cheaply paid workers outside of their factories here or abroad or to more plainly resort to employing contractuals working side by side with regular ones.
Last year, NXP Electronics (formerly Philips) in Laguna, gave “early retirement” to 800 of its regular employees, thus reducing the 2,200-strong workforce to just 1,600. At present, NAFLU-KMU secretary-general Tony Pascual told Bulatlat, the NXP employees’ union and NXP are having a tough time discussing in their ongoing collective bargaining negotiations the “allowable” extent of increasing contractual workers in NXP.
Asahi Glass in Pasig, meanwhile, saw its workers on the brink of a strike last December in protest of the termination of more than 20 regular employees. While 20 would seem too few compared to the number of retrenched workers in NXP and PLDT, Labog says this latest termination seems to be just a prelude to another wave of terminations. He explained that before the workers’ union in Asahi reverted to KMU a few years ago, its ranks had been almost completely decimated, from a thousand to barely 200, under the leadership of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP).
The older, relatively “veteran” companies in the business of garments and textiles are also more cruelly feeling the pinch of Arroyo’s economic boom. According to Joselito Ustarez, KMU vice president and NAFLU chairman, it seems hard to believe yet it’s happening now – the two-decade-old Laws Textiles in Taguig City seems bent on closing down and terminating its 500-strong regular workforce and more than 1,000 contractual workers.
For 21 years, said Ustarez, workers there have bent over their machines to produce tons upon tons of knitted wear for export to the U.S., Canada, Germany and other European countries. Gap was one of their more popular brands. But last Dec. 5, their employers told them “there’s no more work,” and they were asked to just come back on Jan. 7.
They did, only to be told of Laws Textiles’ planned closure and offer of a separation package. Now the union is picketing the gates to protest the closure and what is shaping up to be a case of a runaway shop, the company’s workers told Bulatlat. “Laws will resume operation by reopening nearby Fornax and employing mostly lower-paid, non-unionized contractuals,” said Flores.
Unlike in the cases of small export-oriented companies that were really driven to close by the “strong” peso, these medium to large import-dependent, export-oriented companies can offset their “losses” due to the “strengthening” peso through savings on imports, said Ustarez.
In fact, Laws Textiles, for instance, is not actually losing. Gina Flores, vice president of the workers’ union in Laws Textiles, SALAMAT-NAFLU-KMU, told Bulatlat that “Laws’ 2004-2007 financial report clearly shows it’s earning good profit. Even though profits slipped a bit in 2007, its 2005-2006 profit is big enough to more than make up for the slip,” said Flores. “Besides, it’s still profit, isn’t it? What more do they want?”
More profits, apparently. According to Labog, most cases involving massive retrenchment of workers in the Philippines’s medium to large companies have more to do with jacking up profits than surviving imagined losses.
“Unfortunately, when workers struggle to oppose terminations of this sort, Arroyo’s ‘full force of the law’ bears down hard on us, said Labog. He said that just last week, more than 50 joint forces of the Laguna police and Laguna Industrial Park police swooped down hard on the picketline of Hanjin Garments workers to shoo them away from the premises.
“We’re calling on all workers and freedom-loving Filipinos to help press for the eradication of AJ (assumption of jurisdcition),” said Labog. “Since the Labor Department stumbled on this convenient mode of trampling on the workers’ democratic rights, thousands of workers had been attacked in their picketlines. “
“This shouldn’t be the plight of Filipino workers. “There’s more to real economic development than jobs that offer low wages, few benefits and little security amidst a so-called growth,” said Labog.
Genuine national industrialization
In the papers, analysts are shaken by the impending U.S. recession. They’re spooked with gloomy talks of its likely effects on the Philippine economy.
“Their hearts are in the right place for ordinary Filipinos,” said Bong Labog, “but we’re not surprised (by the U.S. recession or gloomy talks) because as far as the workers are concerned, we’d always been in a state of crisis.”
Labog conceded though that if there’s something spooky in the impending U.S. recession, it’s the possibility that employers will harp on it to intensify their drive for contractualization and low wages.
“After all, it’s always the workers whom the government and employers ask to do and give ‘sacrifices’ so the economy would boom,” said Labog. And indeed, their economy is booming, he said. “Just look at the profit margins of the country’s top corporations.”
Even Laws Textiles had profited so much from the workers’ productivity that they’ve expanded by putting up other factories here and in China, said Gina Flores.
“We need jobs that’ll treat us as humans, jobs whose created profits are not spirited out of the country but are plowed back into real development projects and social services,” said Labog.
He decried the lowly conditions to which Filipino workers have been consigned by the government.
“We’re slave-wage laborers in our own country and abroad,” said Labog. “This cannot go on forever.”
“We hope every thinking Filipino will rally for the P125 ($3.07 at an exchange rate of $1=P40.68) daily wage increase demand, as well as for the end of AJ and contractualization,” Labog said.
But more than that, he said that real industrialization is what the country sorely needs to have. He warned that with the likes of Arroyo in power and her fixed implementation of the International Monetary Fund-World Bank (IMF-WB) agenda of liberalization and deregulation, that only diminish whatever semblance of manufacturing we have as well as adversely affect the country’s agriculture, Filipinos can only brace for the worst.
Or unite to end her regime and the policies of her booming elitist economy. Contributed to Bulatlat
