COVID-19 is real. Don’t let your guard down. Labor rights nongovernment organization Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) raised alarm over the rising number of COVID-19 cases in workplaces.
On July 30, several news outfits reported the 24-hour shutdown of a Japanese-owned electronics manufacturing company in our country due to the 290 workers who tested positive for the illness. All of the 290 workers whose swab tests turned positive were asymptomatic. Reports also state that three other companies in Laguna are to be shut down temporarily due to the high number of COVID cases. Thirty other companies in the special economic zones in Biñan and Sta. Rosa, have also reported cases of COVID-19, according to PEZA.
This is not the first case of outbreak in workplaces. Just this July, 394 workers at a construction site in Bonifacio Global City, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig tested positive for COVID.
CTUHR has been receiving reports of COVID cases in BPO companies, banks and manufacturing companies. Worse are reports of employers lacking transparency and appropriate contact-tracing of the cases.
Let this sink in. Workers’ lives are put at risk everyday. And it is not only because of COVID-19. The government’s incompetence and neglect of the clamor of the people for mass testing add to the danger workers are facing.
The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) Interim Guidelines on Workplace Prevention and Control of COVID-19 must be followed. And free mass testing especially among workers who are one of the most vulnerable sectors affected in this pandemic would be most welcome.
No amount of Department of Health re-tagging of COVID-19 patients can cover up the alarming health crisis we are in and how this government brought the country to this. The government has locked us down for more than four months now and we have seen that it’s not keeping the numbers down.
As long as this government will refuse to implement urgently the obvious necessary step – mass testing, to begin with – we will not reach the flattening of the curve that we are all praying for.
