Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo boasted of her country’s recent economic growth. However, a Philippine labour activist, during a visit to PSAC on October 11, explained that this growth has occurred amid a continuing increase in human and trade union rights violations.

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“Human rights violations under the Arroyo regime has surpassed the record under the Marcos dictatorship,” says Arnel Salvador, the deputy executive director of the Workers Assistance Center (WAC) in Cavite province, Philippines.

Salvador’s one-month tour in Canada seeks to raise awareness among and gain support from Canadians, particularly the labour movement, for the Filipino workers’ struggles against the spate of labour repression and human rights violations under the Arroyo regime.

From the time Arroyo assumed power on January 20, 2001 until June 30, 2006, more than 60 leaders, members, organizers and supporters of trade unions and workers organizations have been killed. They are among the more than 800 victims of political killings of progressive activists and critics of the Arroyo regime. Aside from killings, other trade union violations include assaults on the picketline, illegal arrests and detentions, grave threats, intimidations, abductions and harassment. According to the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR), an independent workers research institute in the Philippines, there were 982 cases of trade union and human rights violations victimizing 77,028 workers from 2001 to 2006.

John Gordon & Arnel Salvador

This trend continues. From January to August 2007 alone, CTUHR has documented 59 cases of human rights violations that affected more than 800 workers. More than half of these cases occurred in 20 export processing zones (EPZ) located in five provinces surrounding the Philippine National Capital Region, including the area that Salvador’s group targets for organizing. Company guards and police forces were involved in those violations.

The EPZ in Cavite is the largest in the Philippines, with 267 foreign-owned factories employing 65,000 workers. Two unions have gone on strike against two Wal-Mart suppliers, the Korean-owned Chong Won Fashions and Phils Jeon Garments, which employ a total of about 800 workers. The strikers are protesting their employers’ refusal to negotiate a collective agreement, despite the fact that the courts have declared their unions as the certified bargaining agents. The strikers have suffered harassment, threats and intimidations, assaults and violent dispersals over the course of their year-long struggle.

“The labour movement in Canada has to add its voice to the international clamour already denouncing these human rights violations,” said Salvador. “I’m urging a joint action campaign between the Philippine and Canadian labour movement to realize an end to extra-judicial killings and attacks against the trade union movement in the Philippines.”

For more information:

• Public Services International
• Amnesty International
• Center for Trade Union and Human Rights