THE Philippines has a fairly progressive legal framework recognizing the rights of workers to associate freely and have a voice on national and industry policies affecting them. These rights are a product of long workers’ struggle for collective advancement that dates back from the American colonial period at the turn of the 20th century and which continues to the present.
The 1987 Constitution is quite explicit on the various rights of the workers. Section 3, Article XIII, provides for the
following:
“The State shall afford full protection to labor, local and overseas, organized and unorganized, and promote full employment and equality of employment opportunities for all.
“It shall guarantee the rights of all workers to self-organization, collective bargaining and negotiations, and peaceful concerted activities, including the right to strike in accordance with law. They shall be entitled to security of tenure, humane conditions of work and a living wage. They shall also participate in policy- and decision-making processes affecting their rights and benefits as may be provided by law.”
And yet, the unionized workers who enjoy collective bargaining rights constitute a distinct minority, less than 1 percent of the 43 million plus work force. As gathered by the ILO Manila Office, in its Decent Work Country Diagnostics (2017), there were 17,245 registered unions in the private sector in 2016, and yet, only 1,126 of these unions have collective bargaining agreements. These CBAs covered a total of 200,476 workers, a figure equivalent to half of 1 percent of the total employed of 40 million for the year 2016. Moreover, the CBA rates have been going down since 2003.
So what accounts for the low rate of unionism and declining CBA coverage despite what is supposedly to be a favorable and pro-union legal system in the Philippines?
Several major explanations can be advanced:
First, the traditional base of trade unionism—the formal sector establishments with 20 or more workers—is not growing as fast as the swelling informal sector (two-thirds of the labor force), the overseas migration (10 million plus OFWs), and the micro, small and medium enterprises or MSMEs (which account for 99 percent of registered enterprises).
Second, paid work in the organizable formal sector is increasingly subjected to “informalization” processes, meaning employers are resorting more and more to short-term and casual hiring arrangements such as the utilization of third-party manpower agencies and putting workers on five-month probationary status (terminated before the six-month regularization requirement of the law). Yes, the anti-endo campaign of the trade unions and the DOLE are bearing some fruits. However, this does not erase the fact that the overwhelming majority of workers still have short-term employment contracts, while many in the MSME enterprises have no employment contracts at all.
Third, the export-oriented services sector, composed of the emergent call centers and business-process outsourcing firms doing offshored ICT-based services, is generally immune from union organizing drives for various reasons such as the anti-union policy of companies, project-based hiring system, low level of awareness on unionism by ICT-savvy millennial workers and limited access of union organizers to workers doing night work in high-rise fully guarded buildings. CC-BPO work is done mostly at night to service American and European clients in their day time.
Fourth, a new but nonunionized work force is emerging under the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There are tens of thousands of online “freelancers” registered with Upwork and other online mediating firms, including the ride-hailing firms such as Grab. There are no unions of online freelancers and there are no blueprints on how to unionize them. In the first place, there is a great deal of uncertainty over their status: independent contractors or employees?
Fifth, there is a general race-to-the-bottom attitude among employers and human-resource managers on the treatment of workers, as reflected in the widespread practice of external labor-market flexibility in a liberalized and globalized Philippine economy (in contrast to the situation in the 1950s-1960s when the domestic economy was sheltered by the policy of industrial protectionism). Moreover, many unionized domestic firms, bred by the said program of industrial protectionism, collapsed in the 1980s-2000s under the IMF-World Bank-supported structural adjustment program (SAP). The unionized export-oriented garments industry also collapsed in the 1980s-2000s, due to the removal of the market quotas under the Clothing and Textile Agreement of the World Trade Organization and the failure of the Philippine garments industry to compete with other producers in Asia in terms of productivity and prices.
Aside from the above difficult external environment for union organizing, the trade union movement is weakened by internal divisions. Over a hundred labor federations compete with one another in organizing across industries, unmindful if there are existing unions or not in these industries. These have spawned numerous and debilitating intra- and interunion conflicts. These conflicts are further exacerbated by political and ideological and even personal/family differences among the trade union leaders. So, can the unions be a force for change in Philippine society?
The reality is that the trade union movement has remained society’s conscience. The various labor groups have been the leading articulators of the interests of society’s “laylayan.” They have been critical of the deepening social and economic inequality, the poor employment outcomes from SAP and the trickle-down economic programs developed by the technocrats, the anti-poor assaults of the new tax program and so on.
And despite its limited base, the trade union movement has managed to push for a number of protective labor laws and keep a seat in the tripartite industrial relations system. This gives them a platform to air unions’ position on various issues and an opportunity to be heard in official consultation meetings on labor matters, at the national and regional levels. Worker representatives are also appointed in different tripartite bodies such those dealing with social security, health and safety, dispute settlement, wage boards and so on. There are also worker-based political parties given special seats in Congress.
Meanwhile, a number of progressive unions have been collaborating with enlightened academics and civil society organizations (CSOs) to advance broader worker organizing through an adjustment in the traditional way workers are organized and their interests are advanced. The concept of “social movement unionism” or SMU has been accepted and articulated by some labor leaders, who realize the importance of covering under the union umbrella all workers, regular and non-regular, formal and informal.
The trade unions, including those sitting in Congress, have been supportive of the proposed “Magna Carta for Workers in the Informal Economy,” which seeks to establish a system of registering organizations of informal workers at the local and national levels. MCWIE seeks to strengthen further existing initiatives of some CSOs and people’s organizations (POs) in organizing different segments of the labor force, e.g., migrants, domestic workers, tribal people, home-based workers, nonwage transport workers, ambulant vendors, coastal fisherfolks, landless rural poor and so on.
If the splintered trade union movement succeeds in forging unity and building productive partnership with the CSOs and POs involved in various forms of worker organizing, there is no doubt that the movement shall become a lot stronger and help shape Social Philippines.