Progressive labor belies DOLE’s ‘claim of ‘industrial peace’
Despite the difficulties posed to unions and workers’ organizations by the intensifying repression and contractualization, the total number of labor disputes recorded and “handled” by the labor department itself has continued to increase in 2011.
By MARYA SALAMAT
Bulatlat.com
MANILA – In 2011, unionists who suffered imprisonment for having launched a strike faced the threat of being jailed again if they failed to raise money for their increased bail. In the same year, strikers from another company, from the Nestlé core factory in Asia, spent the year urging the Aquino government to press Nestlé to respect and implement the Supreme Court decisions affirming the workers’ reasons for having launched a strike since 2002. The then Arroyo government and Nestlé management had just reportedly converted the façade of the factory into a “military garrison” against the strikers. In 2011, too, several fatal accidents in workplaces revealed the dangerous combination of contractualization and lack of government regulation of occupational health and safety.
And then shortly before 2011 ended, the much publicized massive retrenchment in Philippine Airlines (PAL), denounced by affected employees as PAL’s way of replacing regular workers with contractual workers, was finally implemented. It was supported by the labor secretary and President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. As the Labor Secretary assumed jurisdiction over the labor dispute months before, the workers response was dismissed as a “wildcat strike” by the DOLE and PAL management. They had the workers bodily dragged off the airport premises and summarily laid off..... MORE
Source: Bulatlat.com
URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2012/01/27/progressive-labor-belies-dole%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98claim-of-%E2%80%98industrial-peace%E2%80%99/
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