Fighting back for wage, jobs, land, and justice!
(Notes for International Workers Day "May Day")
For the reactionary order's wanton disregard for worker's rights and welfare, of ever prevailing unjust working conditions, a still-neglected policy towards farmers and the desire for land and justice, what more of an ever-continuing repression on the pretext of maintaining stability, these and more are valid grounds for the intensification of the struggle not just for worker's rights but also for national liberation and social justice.
It may sound usual as in the past years, but the continuing repression and its popular response has resonated through and through. Contractualisation has been remained a major matter in which workers continue to assail and demand aborgating it, all despite what the Duterte regime promised to put an end to the scheme with its Executive Order 51, even bragging that it will punish companies implementing anti-worker job flexibility schemes.
However, that Executive Order 51, touted by the regime as its anti-contractualisation policy, hath allowed third-party agencies to sub-contract labor, hence diminishes its "purpose" if not obviously made hurriedly to silence the ever-growing dissent of Filipino laborers pointing against Duterte and his camarilla; furthermore, the Order as well as other unjust policies continues to curry favour to interests, remaining to be subservient to the neoliberal order propagated by imperialists primarily those of the United States, and newcomers like China.
And to think that the reactionary Philippine government peddles workers to foreign corporations and allowing capitalists to exploit further despite existing laws, recent acts has further justified a policy that meant depressing wages, removing benefits and laying off workers to rationalize production and operational costs. apologists would even blame as in the past the Unions and of the concerned whose sympathy for the worker's and other laboring masses' desire for a just wage, benefits, and working conditions be tantamount to against the law- whose decrees obviously benefited the ruling class.
This aggressive setting, as in the past may say that the regime, no matter it tries to present itself as bringer of change, still failed to heed the call of the workers and other laboring masses and its fight for land, bread, and justice. To think that with policies at first appeared to be benefiting the people such as that promise of take home pay, rising inflation rates dimishes their earning's purchasing power; what more that reports from the Philippine Statistics Authority claiming the current wage rate as sufficient, these and more are deemed as unbelievable as the promise of ending contractualisation nor claiming that it regularised workers and addressed problems related to labor practises and conditions, but instead it incited public disgust at the Duterte government’s obvious lack of sympathy for workers.
The chronic job crisis, contractualization, unfair labor practices, and anti-union policies hounding workers reveal the reactionary government’s bias for capitalists, while band-aid solutions offered by two-faced labor officials prove the futility of reforms whose obvious intent is to provide sugar coatings for existing unjust policies.
This aggressive setting, as in the past may say that the regime, no matter it tries to present itself as bringer of change, still failed to heed the call of the workers and other laboring masses and its fight for land, bread, and justice. To think that with policies at first appeared to be benefiting the people such as that promise of take home pay, rising inflation rates dimishes their earning's purchasing power; what more that reports from the Philippine Statistics Authority claiming the current wage rate as sufficient, these and more are deemed as unbelievable as the promise of ending contractualisation nor claiming that it regularised workers and addressed problems related to labor practises and conditions, but instead it incited public disgust at the Duterte government’s obvious lack of sympathy for workers.
The chronic job crisis, contractualization, unfair labor practices, and anti-union policies hounding workers reveal the reactionary government’s bias for capitalists, while band-aid solutions offered by two-faced labor officials prove the futility of reforms whose obvious intent is to provide sugar coatings for existing unjust policies.
***
Other than the workers, the peasants and the urban poor feel the burnt of repression under the Duterte regime. Both did felt how the purchasing power of their pesos diminished as inflation rates rises what more of the tax reform law that increases prices of goods and services. The peasant still demanded land especially those in the contested estates, so is the urban poor dweller that demanded on site housing and livelihood given their years working for the cities as construction workers, househelps, and in urban transport as drivers and conductors.
Both peasants and the urban poor, like the workers, also felt the repression of the order with the recent killings whose justifications either involve red scare or illegal drugs, all simply because of their just desire for decent land and housing, if not because of being themselves as becoming concerned, aware regardless of the propaganda peddled over by the order and its apologists; what more that landlords, compradores, and the state been trying to evict the urban poor from their homes or forcing to compromise peasants for starvation wages and unfair sharecropping, coupled by threats of red scare in an attempt to silence their dissent.
But again, like the workers, these folks chose to seek truth from facts as oppression grows under Duterte. Recent actions showed that these folks had enough of forced evictions, unfair sharecropping, starvation wages in plantations, militarisation, and various forms of state-sponsored terrorism. Like the workers, the demand for land, livelihood, and justice been resonated through as they supported the cause of the workers in its struggle for just wage, better working conditions, an end to contractualisation and various forms of injustices in the workingplace.
But again, like the workers, these folks chose to seek truth from facts as oppression grows under Duterte. Recent actions showed that these folks had enough of forced evictions, unfair sharecropping, starvation wages in plantations, militarisation, and various forms of state-sponsored terrorism. Like the workers, the demand for land, livelihood, and justice been resonated through as they supported the cause of the workers in its struggle for just wage, better working conditions, an end to contractualisation and various forms of injustices in the workingplace.
***
To sum it all, this aggression confronted by the Filipino people is the same one as it has always been – imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. This may sound repetitive but reality shows that it continues the same way such as a continuing relationship between Trump, Xi Jin Ping, Duterte, Marcos, Arroyo, and landlord-compradores like Lorenzo, Floirendo, and Ayala. In it may sound like an 'axis of evil' but it is in this context and against these forces that the people are leading, for so many months, and despite deaths, these heroic and brave popular efforts been continuing to push through all under the slogan of land to the landless, homes for the homeless, just wage and living conditions, and others that to sum it all, the demand for national and social liberation, and economic justice.
Expect Duterte apologists to babble two and fro about this issue badly ranging from crying "wolf" towards its victims to those of justifying the massacre in Negros or any other atrocity in the country evenly as a necessary action of the state: that made this writer think that their brand of order aggravates than mitigates tensions between the haves and the have nots that's prevailing for centuries past.
And to think that despite Duterte did brought some semblance of development as their media outlets babbled about, the reality of ever existing atrocity brought by the order would say that the president, whose oath is to defend and upheld the ruling order, is nothing but a making a continuity like those of his predecessors, and from there revealed further the immense popular anger and resistance against this kind of mess with all its components and accomplices.