(We yield this space to the statement of the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights due to its significance. – Ed.)
LABOR rights nongovernment organization Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) expresses alarm on the deteriorating state of Filipino workers amid the multi-faceted crises – health, employment and human rights crises. The plight of the workers is further worsened by the government’s incompetent pandemic response and the attacks and injustices against them.
Two Labor Days into the pandemic, the Filipino working class is struggling. Unemployment is at a record high at 4.4 million, the highest in 15 years and officially, 7.6 million Filipinos are hungry. The success of community pantries attests to the deeper hunger of the poor and their frustration to the government and belief that they (the poor) can make a difference. Meanwhile, those who still have their jobs continue to experience income loss as they became more flexible – working hours are reduced, placed in floating status, and transportation costs and basic commodity prices rise.
The government refuses to heed the demand for P10,000 monthly cash aid for affected workers for food but it has funds for its costly anti-insurgency and drug wars. State and employers used the pandemic to ignore calls for wage increase and benefits amidst hunger and poor health.
The government fails to protect workers from exposure to COVID-19 infections as they are asked to make the economy afloat while it implements its militarist lockdown, lack of mass testing and places economic frontliners at the back of vaccine priorities.
It is also highly alarming that government funds and state forces are used to further systematize and intensify blows against trade union and human rights defenders. Vilification of unionists demanding improvements in their situation are brazenly red-tagged and filed with ridiculous trumped up criminal charges. CTUHR has monitored more than 100 arrests in protests, even though protesters follow the basic health protocols. It could be recalled that 76 protesters were arrested in Labor Day actions all over the country, last year. State forces have also arrested at least 15 unionists and labor organizers (12 of which are still detained), using the same scheme: violent serving of search/arrest warrants, planting of firearms and explosives and filing of trumped-up charges. The Center also monitored cold murders of at least eight farmworkers, urban poor, unionists and labor organizers since the onset of the community quarantine last March 2020.
The Filipino workers and the people do not deserve this kind of governance which does more harm than good. People are dying every day and not just because of COVID-19. They are dying because of state terrorism and government neglect.
