On Brion's SC appointment: GMA has a penchant for appointing butchers

First it was promoting Col. Jovito Palparan to general, now labor secretary Arturo Brion to Supreme Court justice. Both have one thing in common – butchers they are!

Palparan became notorious for his trail of activists’ blood in Southern Tagalog, Eastern Samar, Central Luzon and other regions.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s appointment of labor secretary Arturo Brion to SC post is an insult to the Filipino workers. Brion’s terms of office as labor undersecretary and secretary account for the wholesale trade union repression and killings, and the massacre of regular jobs.

In a Conference of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland on July 2007, Brion accused KMU’s complaint lodged against the Philippine government on the extrajudicial killings of trade unionists, organizers, and sympathizers as “premature, sinister, and forum shopping”. Brion insisted on the Philippine’s internal investigative processes. All these in an attempt to dissuade the highly respectable ILO from conducting an investigation of the case presented.

But has he, as labor secretary, done anything to at least order an investigation on the issue being presented? Or has he or his department looked into the problems of the Filipino workers?

Workers have exhausted all possible and legal means that their plight be addressed including endless recourse to the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) which Brion headed. However, DoLE, in contrast to its supposed purpose and service, unwaveringly remained an anti-worker and union buster government institution.

Following his predecessor Patricia Santo Tomas, Brion brought DoLE’s reputation to the highest degree of infamy.

As of June last year, 459 labor cases from Southern Tagalog alone are pending at the National Labor Relations Commission, a branch under DoLE. Most of these involve illegal dismissal of workers. Out of these cases, only 25 were resolved of which 19 favored the management. The 6 remains a question whether it will be implemented and DoLE has done nothing to compel the management to act accordingly with the decisions.

Brion acted blandly and has not released the writ of executions for the implementation of SC decisions favoring Nissan and Nestle workers, promulgated since June 21, 2006 and August 22, 2006, respectively. DoLE’s cauldrons are still cooking all the nastiest ingredients just so to reverse these decisions in favor of multinational companies, as the department has done so in innumerable cases.

All lies and jest of the GMA administration’s tremendously incredulous praises when Ignacio Bunye extolled Brion for “acting fairly and with an eye defending the rights and welfare of our migrant workers and Filipino labor”.

Just ten (10) days prior to his oath-taking as SC justice, Brion shut his eyes and ears, just as the DoLE’s doors were securely padlocked and guarded at office hours, when Southern Tagalog workers aired their demands on March 6, 2008. Not even a low-ranking DoLE official went out of the building to at least ask the workers their specific cases and problems.

Brion didn’t even nudge a bit when these workers were brutally dispersed by the finest blood-thirsty brutes of the Manila Police District on that same night.

And now GMA says “Brion’s the man!”

Now Supreme Court Justice Arturo Brion, he does not seem to be garbed in the finest of magistrate’s robes, but wears a cloak drenched in workers’ blood.