KMU shouts 'Justice for Filipino Workers' as ILO Mission nears

The Kilusang Mayo Uno is glad that the first International Labor Organization–High-Level Mission to the Philippines is finally pushing through this September 22-29.

Since the start of the Arroyo regime in 2001, the trade -union movement in the country, like other movements of the Filipino people, has been at the receiving end of a systematic and vicious attack. We Filipino workers have been experiencing violations of our basic and trade union rights in a level never before seen in the our country’s post-Martial Law period.

Our members and leaders have been killed, abducted, illegally detained, charged with trumped-up cases, harassed, and threatened. Force has been used to break up our rallies and strikes. Our factories and communities have been militarized. The country’s president herself set the tone of the campaign to demonize progressive groups and brand workers as “terrorists in factories” in the name of justifying the bloody crackdown of her critics.

It is in this context that we filed a complaint to the ILO in 2006. On one hand, we wanted an immediate end to the attacks on our human and trade-union rights. On the other hand, we felt that we cannot rely on government institutions to put an end to these attacks, because the government has thoroughly coopted and corrupted them. The subsequent mission of United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to the country convinced us of the value of international public opinion and the pressure it can exert on the Arroyo regime to stop the rampant human and trade-union rights violations.

The Arroyo regime initially refused to welcome the mission, its former secretary of labor, who is now a justice of the Supreme Court, even went as far as asking the ILO to not pay attention to our group because, according to him, we are “a political front” of the Communist Party of the Philippines and New People’s Army. With the ILO and the trade-union movement’s insistence, however, the Arroyo regime was forced to give way and welcome the mission which will be conducted this month.

We hope that the mission will expose the situation of Filipino workers to the Filipino people and to the peoples of the world. We hope that it will spur people in the country and abroad to be more vigilant and to protest the anti-worker, anti-people moves of the Arroyo regime and the regimes that will follow it. We hope that it will also expose government policies and structures that are responsible for the wave of attacks that we have witnessed since 2001.

We vow to keep a close watch on this mission, assisting in whatever way we can to present to the mission the human- and trade-union rights situation in the country. We urge the media and other institutions in our country to do the same.

Justice for Filipino workers!
Stop trade-union repression in the Philippines!
Defend and uphold trade-union rights!
Fight for better wages, decent jobs and the exercise of our rights!