The National Confederation of Transportworkers’ Union (NCTU) stage a nationwide simultaneous transport action, from motorcade rally, recoreda, picketing of LTO office and transport strikes, and slams DOTC and the LTO for imposing exorbitant fines and penalties.

“DOTC Department Order 2008-39 is patently illegal,” Dodong Petalcorin, National Treasurer of the NCTU, said. “Congress must rescind it immediately,” he added.

Petalcorin explained that the DOTC erred when they used EO 197 and EO 218 as a basis in imposing additional exorbitant fines and penalties. “The DOTC has no power to determine the appropriateness of fines and penalties to be imposed for violations of traffic rules and regulations in view of its severity and the national scope of its application,” Petalcorin said. “This is a matter that is entirely up to Congress itself,” he stressed.

Ernesto Cruz, NCTU National Chairman, welcomed the action of the House Committee on Transportation, headed by Rep. Monico O. Puentevella of Bacolod City, to call for a suspension of the implementation of DO 2008-39 after the officials of the LTO failed to justify its legal basis.

“While the suspension of the order would provide a temporary relief to transport workers, DO 2008-39 would continue to be a threat hanging over our heads unless it is rescinded,” Cruz said.

“This will only be the first of a series of transport strikes and mass actions that the NCTU intend to conduct unless government finally listens and act favorably to their demand,” Petalcorin said.

Ernie Cruz is also the local president of Samahan ng mga Tsuper at Operator sa Starmall, Edsa, Crossing at Kalentong Annex (STOMECKA) in Mandaluyong while Dodong Petalcorin is also the local president of Network of Transport Organization (NETO) based in Davao.

The Nationwide actions is simultaneously conducted at the National Capital Region, Cebu, Iloilo Cagayan De Oro, Davao, Cotabato, and General Santos.

The National Confederation of Transportworkers Union (NCTU) is a national organization of drivers and other transport workers affiliated with the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL). NCTU is also affiliated to the International Transportworkers Federation (ITF).

AFTER the groundbreaking decisions on the party list and oil deregulation laws during its summer sessions in Baguio City, the Supreme Court is again being asked to convene en banc to review the now becoming infamous “shaved heads are illegal strike” ruling by its Second Division last November.

Although the SC justices are still in Baguio, members of different trade unions and other mass organizations picketed today the Supreme Court as part of their series of actions to press the high court to reverse its finding that uphold the dismissal of Dusit Hotel Nikko workers for allegedly staging an “illegal strike” by going to work with shaven heads.

In January 2002 Dusit prevented its workers from reporting to work – after many male staff cropped their hairs in protest of management’s dilatory tactics in the collective bargaining negotiations – forcing them to hold a picket outside the hotel. Dusit later terminated 90 of them, including 29 union officers, and suspended 136 others, among them were women and other males who did not even cut their hairs but were union members.

Highlights in the unprecedented verdict penned by Associate Justice Presbitero Velasco Jr. include the assertion that violation of the Dusit’s “grooming standards” had caused disruptions in the hotel’s operations and thus tantamount to an “unprotected” (by law) mass action “and should be considered as an illegal strike.”

Similarly, the Velasco ruling declared that when the employees went to work with shaven heads, there was “clearly a deliberate and concerted action to undermine the authority of and to embarrass” Dusit and, “therefore, not a protected action.”

These and other grounds cited in the said ruling on the Dusit case are now part of the Philippine jurisprudence as G.R. 163942 and G.R. 166295.

But what at first a lonely and tough battle for the Nuwhrain-Dusit Hotel Nikko Chapter (N-DHNC) against the illegal lockout and union-busting actions of the Dusit Hotel – as well as the ensuing pro-management rulings of the DOLE’s National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC), the former 8th Division of the Court of Appeals (CA), and finally the SC’s 2nd Division – has become a fight also of various organizations of workers and other sectors from across the political spectrum.

Calling the Velasco ruling as a “travesty of justice,” a “dangerous precedent” and a form of “judicial legislation,” which has wide-ranging repercussions to the broader human, labor and trade union rights – including the freedom of expression and to peaceful concerted actions – a motley group of trade unionists and other advocacy groupings have met and planned for joint campaigns to overturn that “outrageous” court decision.

Aside from regular pickets at the Supreme Court and other mass actions, this loose and nameless alliance has already filed motions for reconsiderations (MR) and motions for interventions (MI) – including those representing each the private and public sector unions.

Signatories for the first MI of unions in the private sector are the Alliance of Coca-Cola Unions-Philippines (ACCUP), Automotive Industry Workers Alliance (AIWA), League of Independent Bank Organizations (LIBO), Manggagawa sa Komunikasyon ng Pilipinas (MKP), National Alliance of Broadcast Unions (NABU), National Labor Union (NLU), Pinag-Isang Tinig at Lakas ng Anakpawis (PIGLAS), Philippine Metalworkers’ Alliance (PMA), and Workers’ Solidarity Network (WSN).

In the public sector unions, those who initially signed the MI include the Confederation of Independent Unions in the Public Sector (CIU), Postal Employees Union of the Philippines (PEUP), Public Services Labor Independent Confederation (PSLINK), and the Union of Statistics Employees (USE).

Other groups that filed their separate MI include Cebu-based labor unions, led by the Bank of the Philippine Islands Cebu Employees Independent Union, in Bohol, the University of Bohol Employees Union and in Cagayan De Oro City, the Nestle Workers in Cagayan De Oro Factory. Davao Holcim Employees and Workers’ Union (DAHEWU) and Holy Cross of Davao College Faculty Union (HCDCFU) in Davao. Even the Archdiocesan Ministry for Labor Concerns (AMLC) of the Archdiocese of Manila has also filed an MI for the Dusit union case.

The Dusit case has also been discussed in a forum sponsored by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Manila, and several global union federations (GUFs) are already aware of this case.

The Dusit Hotel union is affiliated with the National Union of Workers in Hotel, Restaurant and Allied Industries (NUWHRAIN), which in turn is a member of the national labor center Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL). Likewise, NUWHRAIN is an affiliate of the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), a GUF.

APL Youth against BNPP

In celebration of Earth Day today, members of APL-Youth around the country will reaffirm their commitment to protect and to nurture the deteriorating environment by staging a protest actions against a proposed law in Congress that seeks to revive the country’s mothballed nuclear plant.

Rep. Mark Cojuangco of Pangasinan filed last July House Bill 4631 or the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant Re-Commissioning Act of 2008 claiming that nuclear power is the cheapest and safest source of electricity, it could help curb global warming or climate change as it is the best if not the only alternative to the widespread use of toxic fossil fuel (petroleum, coal, etc.), and it would address a possible power crisis in 2012.

Mirasol Capellan, APL-Youth national secretary general, said that Cojuangco is merely mouthing the “old nuclear folly and fallacies” that have recently been restored by a clique of transnational corporations that controls the global nuclear industry.

Construction of nuclear facilities is notorious for always being late on schedule of their completion and for overshooting their earmarked funds, Capellan added. Hence, any timetable for the BNPP rehabilitation will remain doubtful, and its final costs will most probably exceed the $1-billion allocation that HB 4631 is asking.

Studies reveal that no less than $1.5 billion is now needed to build a medium-capacity nuclear power plant, which has about 30 years of productive life. Still excluded are the overall operating expenses for the facility, funds for the maintenance and management of radioactive wastes, and payments for the eventual dismantling of the plant, which costs at least as much as its construction.

Two examples here are the BNPP’s initial budget costing for its construction has skyrocketed from $600 million to eventually $2.3 billion, not counting the $640 million incurred as interest payment; and the total cost for the closure only of the Eccellente-Phenix reactor in France was estimated at $2.4 billion.

APL-Youth also reminded the congressman that the whole life cycle of nuclear plant is filled with danger, especially the mining, processing, transporting and using of the plant’s radioactive fuel, whose toxicity lasts for about 1,000 years and could cause sickness and death to people and animals, as well as could poison the soil, water and the atmosphere.

Plutonium, the power plant’s waste product, is even more lethal than the nuclear fuel as its very powerful toxins could remain for over 240,000 years, and it is both a key ingredient for nuclear weapons – thus, the added risk of nuclear arms proliferation – and a deadly carcinogen.

Similarly, Cojuangco’s BNPP revival was based on unreliable projections on electricity demands, which was conducted long before the current global recession and based on exaggerated forecasts that started in 1993. Cojuangco claimed that there would be a 3,000-megawatt shortage before 2012 and the BNPP could address at least 20 percent of this shortfall.

This overprojection resulted not only to overcapacity of the Philippine electricity sector but “has been proven to be as expensive as (if not more than) a power shortage.” Data from the Department of Energy showed that in the entire 2007, the country had “an excess capacity of 4,218 MW on a national level” – compared that to BNPP’s untested 621 MW power! In fact, the Department of Energy has recently announced that despite the tight supply in the Visayas and Mindanao, there was a downtrend demand on electricity in Luzon – disputing a key premise of HB 4631, since Luzon is the target area (or at least a fraction of it) of the BNPP “reactivation.”

To bankroll the BNPP rehabilitation, HB 4631 proposes that the government to allocate $1 billion, which could be sourced either by letting electric consumers pay a surcharge of 10 centavos/kWh or through loans. Meaning, new burden to the hapless people in the form of either additional charges on their electric bills or in new taxes.

Due to the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in the US in 1979, the BNPP construction, which started in 1976, was suspended, and even after it was finished in 1984 was permanently shelved by the Aquino government after the downfall of Marcos in 1986; in particular, days after the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine in April of that year.

The BNPP remained idle as it was riddled with safety problems, a subsequent probe disclosed that the power plant had over 4,000 design and structural defects; aside from the “natural dangers” posed by its being close to major earthquake fault lines and to three volcanoes – the then dormant Mt. Pinatubo (but has since shown to be mega-powerful when it erupted in 1992); the latent Mt. Mariveles; and, according to some noted scientists, the “potentially active” Mt. Natib, on which foot in Morong, Bataan is where the BNPP is located.

In addition, the whole BNPP project was filled with huge anomalous transactions, notably overpricing, substandard construction materials, and bribery amounting to tens of millions of dollars (some say up to $80 million). Post-Marcos Philippine governments filed appropriate charges in US courts versus the Westinghouse Electric Co., the BNPP main builder and reactor maker. Unfortunately, the charges were all dismissed.

BNPP was a waste so huge that it could be one of the biggest – if not the biggest of all – white elephant projects of corruption-ridden Philippine governments. A study by a TV program said that the $2.3 billion-cost of the BNPP was enough to buy 130 million sacks of rice to feed the country for one year; and enough to build 200,000 classrooms to house 11 million students.

APL-Youth is advocating for the development and use of alternative, safer, cheaper, more abundant, and “greener” or environmentally friendly power sources, like solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energies. For instance, APL-Youth quoted a research that says that “in one second, the sun sends out more energy than humans have consumed in all of recorded history.”

APL-Youth is the youth arm of the Alliance of Progressive Labor, a national labor center of various workers’ organizations from the private, informal and migrant sectors. APL-Youth, composed of community-, school- and workplace-based teens and young adults ages 15-35, aims to unite and empower the youth sector and to link them with the labor movement and the broader social movements.

Dusit Hotel Nikko workers re-enact the Stations of the Cross

Dusit Hotel Nikko workers re-enact the Stations of the Cross during a protest rally outside the Supreme Court in Manila Monday. Benjie Castro / GMANews.tv

Members of the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) today dramatized their continuing protest over the Supreme Court decision that undermined workers’ fundamental right to freedom of expression by re-enacting Christ’s passion of the cross in front of the High Court.

“The Velasco Decision is another heavy cross that the workers would have to bear,” Reynaldo Rasing, president of the NUWHRAIN-Dusit Hotel Nikko Chapter, said. “It is a judicial legislation that employers would certainly exploit to prevent workers from exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression,” he added.

Coming at a time when workers are starting to feel the full brunt of the global financial crisis, the Velasco Decision is a big blow to the labor movement. “It is the latest effort to roll back our rights – the right to organize, collectively bargain and to strike – that begun when globalization ushered massive changes in the labor market,” Rasing said.

To add insult to injury, the SC’s Second Division denied last 9 February 2009 all pleas for reconsideration filed by various trade unions. In its resolution, the Second Division even included the signature of ex-Justice Ruben T. Reyes, who retired last 2 January 2009.

‘This is a travesty of justice that tends to put the integrity of the Supreme Court in question,” Rasing said. “It is for this reason that we are calling on Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno to review our case en banc,” Rasing added.

The Velasco Decision emanated from a labor dispute back in 2002 when Dusit Hotel workers were prevented from entering the company premises after cropping their heads as part of their protest actions during a collective bargaining deadlock. Claiming that the workers staged an illegal strike, 90 workers were illegally terminated. In response, the union filed a case of union busting and illegal dismissal. Unfortunately, the SC ruled in favor of the management.

Penned by Associate Justice Presbitero J. Velasco, Jr., the decision ruled that the shaving of heads was not a constitutionally protected form of expression because it embarrassed and defied the hotel’s rules on grooming standards. It added that the act of shaving one’s head as a means of protest transgressed the limits of freedom of expression and could validly be restricted by law.

In support of its campaign to reverse the unjust decision, the APL has started an online signature campaign to press the High Court to review the Velasco Decision and to uphold the workers’ fundamental rights. It will also file a complaint before the International Labor Organization (ILO).