"Our Passion, Our Strength!"
A May Day rambling
By Kat Ulrike
It is worth a call for thanksgiving and a call for struggle this May day.
As workers marched from the factory to the streets, of facing the riot policemen and clamouring for justice, May Day is a day of reaffirmation both in their struggle for their rights and a realisation of their aspirations, from their desire to have a decent living wage and better working standards to those of calls for justice against exploiters and of unjust, be it the profiteering employer, the corrupt bureaucrat, and its bloodthirsty attack dogs in uniform who seriously "serve and protect" these ruling degenerates workers ought to detest.
Sounds confronting to think that these people trying to keep the status quo has anything to do with keeping their interest through unfair working conditions, low wages, contractualisation and seasonal-only employments, harassments, neglecting workplace safety and other issues that affected the working class; what more that the latter, being a citizen of its own homeland, hearing issues such as corrupt bureaucrats, bloodthirsty attack dogs, rising costs of goods and services, channeling needed funds to debt servicing and series of white elephants, a mendicant foreign policy, and its series of economic proposals that is pegged to those of oligarch and multinational interests.
Sorry for being radical in its statement, but having the fact that the issues of the laboring masses and the society itself demands a radical solution. To think that as the system afforded to babble recent developments, the labouring masses demand 750 wage increase for the laborers and 16,000 Minimum wage for the government employees, what more of the need for low taxes and of abolishing unjust policies like contractualisation and union-busting, may as well the labouring masses both in the city and in the countryside demand for a revolution and the usurpation of political and economic power from these power greed and profit driven men of the cloth.
And since president Aquino has afforded to praise the workers "for their cooperation in maintaining industrial peace" and "for facing the challenges for global competitiveness", and yet he failed to mention anything on wages and other needs, what more of aloof in hearing various grievances, rather makes everyone remind of the haciendero heritage of these ruling personages amidst babbling peace, development, progress, or even reform and restructuring. Again, it makes everyone's blood boil till willing to demand fire and brimstone against the system!
This International Workers Day, may the labouring masses continue their struggle, to stand and affirm in its principles, and to forge aspirations till the final battle. The system may still remain aloof, or arrogant in asserting its own reaction, but to think that the strength of the working masses is the strength of the nation, the passions been facing lies a strength to overturn the present order.
Our passion is our strength! Till victory!