All is quiet on the labor front

IF a socially-conscious director like Joe Lamangan were to do a documentary on the dying Philippine labor movement, he could opt for a more cinematic title, which is precisely the head of this column: "All is quiet on the labor front." Or, a more straightforward one — Requiem for the Philippine labor movement. In Ken Burns' style of documentary production. Joe Lamangan (in the protest marches in the 1970s, he was Joe, not Joel) can draw from an archival treasure to document how a proud labor movement that started to take roots at the turn of the previous century — right after Isabelo "Don Belong" de los Reyes' return from his Spanish exile and the formation of the Union Obrero Democrata— is now on its death throes.

What happened? What were the intervening factors that made the 21st century so hostile to organized labor and trade union leaders? What factors led the ITUC to rank the Philippines — and rank it consistently — as one of the Top 10 countries most dangerous, most hazardous to workingmen and their leaders? What made labor organizing, which is routine and given in most major European economies, extraordinarily tough and littered with hurdles in the Philippine context? A sobering moment for us all, which was the day the party-list representative of the TUCP or Trade Union Congress of the Philippines voted to scrap the ABS-CBN franchise that led to massive loss of jobs for the network's workers, would have to be somewhere in the docu to highlight to what level of farce the supposed vanguards of the working class have fallen into.