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Issue Number 32, October 2009
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 32, October 2009
AN EXPOSURE WITH THE KMU
Lessons In Genuine Trade Unionism
- Luke Coxon
It had been 11 years since my last visit to the
Philippines. At that time I was a student activist and
was hosted by the League of Filipino Students. I attended
the Peoples Conference against Imperialist Globalisation
and rallies against the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) and then spent a month in the Cordillera with
indigenous communities and mine workers organising
against the rapacious activities of transnational mining
corporations. It was a life changing experience for me.
When I went to the Philippines I already considered
myself a Marxist but my Marxism was something abstract
that I had learnt from books. I had no concept of how
Marxism could actually be applied in practice. This
changed during my integration with workers, students,
indigenous peoples and peasants organised in powerful
social movements that were challenging the power of the
State and corporations. I learnt that Marxism when
applied to the concrete conditions of ones own
society could be an effective tool for organising the
oppressed to bring about transformative social change. I
came to understand what Engels meant when he said Marxism
wasnt a dogma, but a guide to action;
it was a means to understand the world we live in, so as
to be in a position, to be able to change it.
In 2008 I was very excited to be able to return to the
Philippines after so long and this time was accompanied
by two of my comrades from the National Distribution
Union, Simon Oosterman and Ingrid Beckers. We would be
hosted by the militant trade union federation Kilusang
Mayo Uno (KMU) or May First Movement and immersed in
struggling communities for three weeks. I also had the
opportunity to join an international fact finding mission
to investigate violations of human rights and trade union
rights.
The NBN Scandal and International Womens
Day
We arrived in the early hours of March 8, 2008, it was
International Womens Day and Manila was steaming
with protests. Large scale corruption in Government had
recently been exposed through a US$329.5 million contract
for a National Broadband Network (NBN) with a Chinese
corporation. The Presidents husband, Mike Arroyo
and an Arroyo crony Benjamin Abalos, Chairman of the
Commission on Elections (COMELEC) were said to have
received millions of dollars in bribes in the awarding of
the contract. The whistle blower who exposed this bribery
was Jun Lozada, a technical consultant to the NBN
project. The regime had gone all out in an attempt to
silence him, sending him on a paid trip overseas, but
when he decided to return to testify he was kidnapped by
State agents at Manila Airport who tried to convince him
to keep his mouth shut. Jun still choose to speak out and
was a very popular guy. During our weeks in the
Philippines he seemed to be everywhere, at rallies,
addressing various organisations and community groups.
As a result of Juns exposé, there had been
widespread calls for Arroyos resignation and
mobilisations were happening on a daily basis. People had
the feeling that this could be the tipping point. But the
Catholic Church hierarchy was not yet openly calling for
Arroyos resignation and this was holding back a
full scale revolt. The day before we arrived, a rally of
workers from Southern Tagalog, an industrial area a few
hours drive from Manila that was a stronghold of the KMU,
had been violently dispersed outside the Department of
Labor and the KMU headquarters had quite a few battered
and bruised activists around. The International
Womens Day rally had been organised by the militant
womens group GABRIELA to protest against the
corrupt, fascist, anti-people and anti-women Arroyo
regime. The rally started at 9a.m. and went on until the
early evening. This was a new experience for Simon and
Ingrid, who were accustomed to our own rallies lasting
only a few hours. In Manila long rallies are held out of
necessity, as people need the time to be able to converge
from the different metropolitan regions. You have many
rallying points in the morning and everyone eventually
meets together in the early afternoon. We spent several
hours running and walking down EDSA, the main highway, to
get to the convergence point. For one not accustomed to
Manilas heat and pollution it was a tiring and
exhilarating experience. The rallies are very ordered
(you run in formation) and colourful with many banners,
costumes, flags of the different peoples organisations.
At the convergence the numbers were about 10,000 and we
were absolutely knackered. Passionate speeches were given
- Ingrid delivered one on our behalf and we watched many
previous cultural performances. The rally ended with the
ceremonial burning of the US flag and an effigy of
Arroyo.
The Murder Of Gerry Cristobal
The next day we had a briefing on the situation of the
union movement by Ka Wilson Baldonaza the KMU General
Secretary, who has died in 2009. Ka Wilson explained both
the history of the KMU and the present situation of the
trade union movement. The KMU is an anti-imperialist
trade union federation and sees its role not only to
struggle for the bread and butter issues of its members
but also to participate in the wider struggle for social
change. At home trade unions are generally conservative
organisations; they more or less confine themselves to
the economic struggle of their members and lobbying
Government for piecemeal reforms. The KMU is different in
that it is aligned with other peoples organisations
in a struggle for radical political, economic and social
change, and sees this as its primary role. The organisers
live off the smell of an oily rag; unlike us here they
dont get a car and a relatively generous salary, in
the KMU they get an allowance of about $NZ20 per week and
that is to cover all their organising costs. When we
asked Ka Wilson how any one could survive on this he
said, of course it is very difficult and some
organisers have to also work part time, but if you are an
effective organiser and the workers know your situation,
you can rely on them to feed you. The organisers
lived in their communities in which they organised and
lived and breathed the struggle of their union members,
it was arduous and, as we were to learn, extremely
dangerous work. Ka Wilson was explaining how the KMU had
become a target in the Governments
counterinsurgency campaign, in which Leftist activists
were being routinely disappeared and killed by State
forces, when suddenly the reality of this slapped us in
the face. Our briefing was interrupted with a report that
a union leader from Southern Tagalog, Gerry Cristobal,
had just been murdered. Ka Wilson told us this news and
then calmly carried on with finishing the briefing. This
left a sobering impression on us, the killings had become
so common and routine, that you didnt let them stop
you from completing the task at hand.
The next day myself and Ingrid went on our prearranged
exposure to visit factories in the Manila region, while
Simon went with the Centre on Trade Union and Human
Rights to investigate the killing of Gerry Cristobal and
join the indignation rally against his murder. After an
extra-judicial killing, the human rights organisations
investigate and document the circumstances surrounding
the killing, as the State forces (military and Police)
are often complicit and hence cannot be trusted to
investigate it. Gerry was a former worker and president
of the union at EMI Yazaki, a Japanese semi-conductor
company that employs 5,000 workers in Cavite. After the
second attempt on his life he had stopped working at
EMI-Yazaki and had become a full time union organiser of
the Solidarity for Cavite Workers. Gerry was the third
unionist from Emi-Yazaki to be killed and had previously
survived two other assassination attempts. After the
first failed attempt on his life Gerry armed himself with
a pistol for his self defence; when he was shot the
second time, he was able to shoot his would be assassin.
Both were taken to hospital, the assassin was a Police
officer, who wasnt charged or investigated. The
third attempt was successful when hooded men on
motorcycles sprayed his car using Armalite rifles; the
Police reported to the media that his death was an
incident of road rage.
A Visit From Ka Bel
The next day we were honoured to be paid a visit from
that giant of the Filipino Left, Congressman Crispin
Ka Bel Beltran. Ka Bel had wanted to meet and
thank us for organising the protests against Arroyo when
she visited our shores, in 2007. He said he was extremely
happy when he was watching TV and the leading story was
Dennis Maga in a cage outside Parliament. He told us that
as a young man he probably would have done the same for a
comrade. We spoke to Ka Bel about the current political
situation in the Philippines and he expressed the view
that Arroyo would try to change the Constitution to stay
in power and if this failed it was quite likely that she
would declare martial law. We gave him a NDU Union Power
flag; his first response was typical of the self
sacrificing man that was he. He told us we should really
give it to the KMU; when we responded we had another for
the KMU, he beamed up with a very large smile and said he
would go now and hang it in his Congress office. It was
with great sadness that we learnt of Ka Bels death
soon after, in May 2008, aged 75 (see Kapatiran 31,
October 2008, Special Issue on Ka Bel, http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo31/Kap31List.htm - Ed.).
Organising Workers Joe Hill* Style
The next few days we spent in the Southern Tagalog
region, with a KMU expansion union organising team. This
was another point of difference with union organising in
New Zealand. Expansion organising is organising
un-unionised workers or sites, this team of organisers
also happened to be very talented folk singers and they
attracted workers through progressive songs. In the
evenings when the workers had left their factories they
would go to the squatter communities where most lived and
start performing, the first songs would generally be
working class love songs, which would gradually become
more political as the night went on. They would engage in
discussion with the workers to see if they could relate
to the stories that the songs told and this formed the
basis of discussion for the need for unionisation.
From this point they would invite the workers to join
union education sessions and slowly start the process of
organising of the union in the workplace. As many unions
are busted as soon as management get a smell of that an
organising drive is under way, its a very careful
process of gradually building the union in a site until
it is consolidated, only then would the workers declare
themselves union. The workers needed to understand the
risks that the organising would entail, as well as the
limitations of unionism and the need for wider political
and social change to effect real change in the lives of
working class. As one of the organisers told us we
dont offer false hope. *Joe
Hill was an American labour martyr and songwriter who,
when he was about to be executed in 1915, wrote:
Dont waste time mourning for me.
Organise! He is immortalised in the international
working class song I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last
Night. Ed.
Easter Mass In Cavite Jail
We met Amie Dural, the wife of Dennis Maga (who is now an
NDU organiser in Auckland), and she arranged for us to go
to Cavite Jail to meet political prisoner Pastor Berlin
Guerrero. When Arroyo had visited Aotearoa in 2007 it was
to attend an Inter-Faith Conference promoting dialogue
between the different religions. The day she arrived in
New Zealand, Pastor Berlin had been abducted by the
military. Simon was surfing the Net and came across a
story of his abduction and put out a press release
highlighting Arroyos hypocrisy in coming here to
promote interfaith dialogue while the regime had abducted
Pastor Berlin and killed other church workers. In Helen
Clarks meeting with Arroyo we had heard that
concern regarding his abduction was also raised and later
Arroyo was grilled by the press over it. Arroyo was
pressured to call Manila right there and then to order
Police authorities to do something on Pastor
Berlins case. That day Pastor Berlin was
surfaced. We were told if we hadnt done
what we had Berlin would definitely be dead or still
disappeared. Though alive he had been charged with murder
relating to an ambush by the New Peoples Army of the
Communist Party of the Philippines and was at that stage
incarcerated in Cavite Jail awaiting trial.
When we arrived at the jail Pastor Berlin was giving an
Easter sermon to his fellow prisoners. Then Amie told the
story of what happened in New Zealand and this was
greeted with a large round of applause from the fellow
prisoners. I was asked to address the congregation, a new
experience for me as I am not religious in the least. The
prison itself was interesting, you had men and women
imprisoned together, conditions were very poor and
cramped but also seemed quite lax, prisoners would cook
their own food and it almost had the feeling of a little
village. The prison itself was run by a gang, who seemed
to have more control over the place than the guards, they
punished prisoners who broke rules and were even involved
in collecting funds, to upgrade the prison facilities.
Berlin had been able to raise funds to upgrade the
showers. The gang had immense respect for him, he ate at
the table of the gang leader; they had appointed him as
an advisor and even offered to tattoo him with the gang
motif, though he had declined the offer. Pastor Berlin
had established a small medical clinic in the jail to
treat sick prisoners and clean the wounds of punished
prisoners and he established a church choir which he was
also using as a means to politicise and educate the
fellow prisoners. In September 2008 the fabricated
charges against him were dismissed by a court and he was
released. He recently testified to the UN Committee
against Torture on the torture he suffered while being
kidnapped by the military.
Mineworkers Struggle
We next headed to Lepanto in the Cordillera Mountains to
spend time with the mineworkers union. Lepanto is a
mining town high up in the mountains of Northern Luzon,
scenically its a beautiful place; like the rest of
the Cordillera its made up of mountain ranges with
rice terraces cut into it. The town itself was something
like Id imagined the old gold mining towns of the
beginning of the 20th Century being like. It was
completely dominated by the Lepanto Consolidated Mining
Company, which owned everything, including the
workers humble houses. The workers worked long
hours and it was dangerous and gruelling work; the
previous year 16 workers had died and many more injured
themselves. They got paid the equivalent of $NZ15 a day
and this was only because the union had recently won a
100% increase after a successful strike. Workers would
try to smuggle gold nuggets in their anus with the hope
of getting a bit more value for their labour, we were
told that they had become very skilled at this and a
whole black market economy existed in the town for buying
this gold. The town had problems with alcoholism and
other anti-social activities. The union
office was directly above a brothel, the organisers told
me the company had purposely set up the brothel to try to
discredit the union. For many years the mine
workers union was a yellow union that was corrupt
and in the pocket of the company, but a few years ago the
KMU union, the National Federation of Labor Union
(NAFLU), had won the union election and now 1,800 workers
were unionised in three unions to cover the different
sectors of workers - the Lepanto Employees Union (LEU),
Lepanto Security Forces Union (LSFU) and Lepanto Local
Staff Union (LLoSU) - all under the umbrella of NAFLU.
Soon after the KMU won the election the company tried to
bust the new militant union (NAFLU) and the workers went
on strike. They demanded a 100% increase and the end to
contractualisation*, the strike was
successful due to both the unity and militancy of the
workers and some fortuitous luck. Torrential rain filled
the mine up with water, which couldnt be drained
because of the strike; the cost to the company of the
damage was so great that it agreed to the unions
demands. When we arrived the union had just completed
another successful bargaining round this time without the
need for strike action, but the company was refusing to
implement what had been negotiated. We spent a lovely few
days with the union and the workers and their families
sharing our experiences of organising unions, and
drinking quite a bit of the very potent local gin and red
horse beer (beer mixed with gin). The focus of the union
was not only in struggling for improvements for the
conditions of work of its members but also to form an
alliance with the local indigenous community in
opposition to the expansion of the mine. The mine had
polluted the Abra River, destroyed the soil of
surrounding communities, the impact had been devastating
and there had been a long campaign by the local
indigenous communities to have it closed down. It was a
very inspiring example of workers seeing beyond their own
economic interest to embracing environmentalism and
seeing their struggle and that of the indigenous
communities as being one and the same. *Contractualisation
means replacing regular workers with temporary workers
who receive lower wages with no or less benefits. They do
the work of regular workers for a limited period of time,
usually less then six months and are rehired continually
on short term contracts. Because they are so vulnerable
they are often reluctant to join unions.
International Fact Finding Mission On Human And
Trade Union Rights Violations
After visiting the Lepanto workers Simon and Ingrid
proceeded to Sagada in Mountain Province for a bit of
rest and recreation, while I returned to Manila to
participate in the Union Network International Fact
Finding Mission. UNI, the biggest of the global trade
union federations, condemned the killings in the
Philippines and said it wanted to arrange a mission to
investigate the violations. Nearly all the extra-judicial
killings of trade unionists have been against KMU
unionists. UNI and its local affiliates did not have a
relationship with the KMU. The NDU offered to use its own
relationship with the Center on Trade Union and Human
Rights (CTUHR) and the KMU to organise the mission. Its
main focus was on interviewing the victims of human and
trade union rights violations in Southern Tagalog and
Central Luzon.
In Central Luzon we visited the workers of the Hacienda
Luisita in Tarlac. During their strike in November 2004
the military had opened fire on the picket line and 14
were killed. Eventually the union won its demands and
ended the strike. But the same day that the settlement
was signed the union president was gunned down while
having a celebratory drink and things had not improved
since. The sugar mill had been closed down and the
Cojuangco family was attempting to drive the farmers off
the land through force. In the days before we arrived,
the military had been going house to house threatening
union members and we had to meet them in secret. Part of
the hacienda (plantation. Ed.) had been converted into an
export processing zone; one of the companies that had
been unionised was the International Wiring System (IWS).
All of its leaders had been threatened by the military
and feared for their lives and one of them has since been
granted political asylum in Australia.
The fact finding mission concluded with a press
conference that I addressed. In our findings we
concluded: A dirty war is being waged in the
Philippines. Some factories and whole communities are
being militarised, in a counterinsurgency campaign aimed
at destroying the Communist insurgency by 2010. Trade
unionists are being labelled terrorists when
in fact they are the victims of State
terrorism. They are being hunted down forcing the
victims and their families to live in fear. The
mission noted that the primary responsibility for the
violations rested with the Arroyo government and urged
the Government to accept the recommendation of the
Committee on Freedom of Association of the International
Labour Organisation (ILO) for a High Level ILO Mission to
investigate the killings and the massive violation of
trade union rights.
Spending A Year As Volunteer With KMU
I was absolutely exhausted by the end of the fact finding
mission and like my previous trip 11 years ago it had
also changed me. Despite the repression and hardship that
those in the movement face they persevere in the struggle
to build a truly democratic and just Philippines. You
cant help but be inspired by the determination,
courage and commitment of those with whom you spend time.
On my return I approached other NDU organisers to see if
they would be willing to recognise this commitment and
assist the KMU. We all now contribute a weekly amount to
pay for the allowances of five organisers. I have also
decided to return to the Philippines in September 2009
and spend a year as a volunteer with the CTUHR and KMU.
The Government has now accepted the ILO Mission and when
I arrive I will be helping with the preparations for it.
With the recent attempts to change the Philippine
Constitution, and the bombs going off in Mindanao, Ka
Bels prediction of martial law could
well come true. I have promised Murray that I will write
from Manila and keep you all posted from the ground.
Luke Coxon is an organiser with the National
Distribution Union, in Auckland and a PSNA member. #
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