MEMBERS of the Alliance of Progressive Labor-Youth, on the occasion of today’s International Youth Day (IYD), launched their campaign against rampant contractualization by picketing several outlets around the country of McDonald’s – the global fastfood chain that spearheaded the use of contractual labor among the youth.

“This year’s observance of the IYD would be grossly inadequate unless it takes on the scourge of contractualization,” Marco Gojol, APL-Youth spokesperson, said, adding: “Now is the time to raise the collective voice of the youth against this pernicious tactic of unscrupulous employers.”

“Our action today should serve as a warning not just to McDonald’s but to all companies that are abusing workers through contractualization,” Gojol declared, as he informed that APL-Youth pickets will simultaneously be held in selected branches of McDonald’s in Metro Manila, Batangas, Cavite, Cebu, General Santos and Davao.

APL-Youth points to the corporate strategy of deliberate and unbridled contractualization as a major factor to the serious employment problem, including the youth sector, specifically those aged 15 to 24 years old, who, last April alone, already comprised over half (51.1 percent or 1.6 million) of the total 3.09 million unemployed workforce in the country.

Though still conservative, official data also confirm that the youth unemployment rate at 18.8 percent in the same period was already way beyond the national average of 8.0 percent.
The young activists slammed contractualization as a harmful and unjust practice that primarily benefits only the capitalist elites while most of the working people, including the working youth, are doomed to a “job” devoid of security, decent wages and other benefits, and where many labor and trade union rights are withheld.

Gojol emphatically described contractualization as killing the youth’s “chance to live and hope for a decent life and future.”

Contractualization is actually so pervasive not just in McDonald’s and other fastfood businesses but also in almost all types of industries, especially in the burgeoning services sectors of hotels, restaurants and in the business process outsourcing, particularly the call centers, where the 500,000 mostly young Filipinos currently employed here are the world’s second biggest BPO workforce behind India.

But while a study of the International Labor Organization released last month said that Filipino BPO workers “earn 53 percent more than same-age workers in other industries,” it also revealed that one in three workers resign every year due to extreme pressures from “odd (work) hours, irate clients, tedious workloads and (heavy) performance demand.”

A study in 2000 by a leading international research NGO using Philippine government data also showed that the “combined share of casual, contractual and part-time workers in total enterprise-based employment” had increased from 14 to 15 percent in 1990-94 to 18.1 percent in 1995 and to 21.1 percent in 1997, which meant that for every five workers at least one was a non-regular worker.

Another local research has even claimed that between 1995 and 2005, contractual labor in the Philippines has “soared from 65 percent to as much as 78 percent of the country’s employed labor force.”
Whether or not that is accurate, what is certain is that figures on contractuals have surely shot up when businesses in the country, led by large foreign and local firms, have been described as “going on an orgy of contractualization” following the Department Order (D.O.) No. 10-97 in 1997 of the Department of Labor and Employment that sweepingly legalized “flexible work arrangements.”

After widespread protests from organized labor, D.O. No. 10 was revoked in 2001; however all the contracts entered into during its effectivity were honored, and was replaced the next year by D.O. No. 18-02 which practically restored the repealed D.O.

“We are studying hard for a better future and our parents end up being heavily indebted to ensure that we finish our education. But what kind of future would a series of three to five months’ of work will give us?” Gojol asked. “Contractualization could give us nothing but disposable jobs!” he retorted.

The APL-Youth is challenging the Aquino government to generate secure jobs for all, especially for the working youth, and for jobs wherein workers are justly remunerated and their rights are fully respected.
The APL-Youth is also calling for the passage of the Security of Tenure bill, which has been lingering in Congress for more than a decade now.

APL-Youth is the youth arm of the Alliance of Progressive Labor, a national labor center of various workers’ organizations in 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.

As the Philippine celebration of United Nation’s International Youth day opens today, the APL Youth questioned the wisdom behind the government’s education reforms and at the same time lambasted the increasing precariousness of jobs that are available to the youth.

“The crisis in the education system will not be solved by expanding the basic education cycle from 10 years to 12 years nor by venturing into various forms of privatization,” Joanna Bernice Coronacion, National Coordinator of APL Youth, declared. “On the contrary these policies could even worsen the problem,” she added.

The APL Youth believes that expanding basic education to 12 years at this time is unwise. “The plan would entail additional financial burden for working families that are already hard pressed to keep their children in school,” Coronacion said. “It could even be a cruel joke. Even if we expand basic education, work that are made available for us after we graduate would be a series of 3 to 5 month contratual job,” she lamented.

The APL Youth declared that contractualization kills the chance of young workers’ to live a decent life.

The APL Youth asserted that rather than tinker with the length of basic education, government should first address the severe classroom shortage, the low income of teaching and non-teaching personnel, the sub-standard textbooks, and many other issues that lead to low quality of education.

“Public-Private partnerships or even the strengthening of the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education or GASTPE would not solve these problems,” Coronacion said. “Such policies could even worsen the problem by turning public services into expensive commodities, and thereby out of reach of the poor,” she added.

According to the APL Youth, public-private partnerships and the GASTPE are various forms of partial privatization.

“What we need is massive public investment in basic education,” Coronacion said. “This can be done by channeling debt servicing to basic education and other public services,” she added.

The UN International Youth Day opens today in the PICC with the theme, “Strengthening Peace and Human Rights Education for the Youth: Key to Sustainable Development”.  The APL Youth contended that the forum would be grossly inadequate unless it tackles the misguided government solutions to the education crisis and the scourge of precarious work such as the growing pervasiveness of contractualization.

APL Youth is the youth arm of the Alliance of Progressive Labor, a national labor center of various workers’ organizations in 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.

END INJUSTICE IN BURMA! DENOUNCE SPDC’s 2010 ELECTIONS:

PHILIPPINES–To visualize the gravity of the crimes against humanity committed by Burma’s military regime, about a hundred of solidarity activists under the Free Burma Coalition-Philippines (FBC-Phils) today held a rally in front of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and urged the Philippine government to pledge its support to the ongoing international campaigns calling for the creation of a UN commission of inquiry to investigate possible crimes against humanity in Burma.

Said rally is also part of the international commemoration of the 22nd Anniversary of the August 08, 1988 national uprising in Burma where 10,000 peaceful demonstrators were shot, arrested and killed as they demanded democracy and an end to human rights violations and economic mismanagement by the Burmese military junta.

Present during the rally were the Amnesty International (AI), Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP), Partido ng Manggagawa (PM), Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL), Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID), Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP), Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK) and other individual supporters.

“With these continuing political repression and grave violations of human rights in Burma, how could we ensure the credibility and democratic integrity of Burma’s 2010 elections? The peoples of Burma need genuine democratic reforms but the ruling junta is simply unable and unwilling to fulfill its promised reforms,” said Egoy Bans, spokesperson of the FBC-Phils.

“Unless the junta institute tangible political reforms including the release of all political prisoners, all-inclusive review of the 2008 Nargis-constitution and cessation of hostilities against ethnic nationalities in Burma, this planned election will be perceived as a move only to legitimize the military junta’s hold to power,” Bans added.

FBC-Phils urged the Philippine government to lead the ASEAN in applying pressures to the military government of Burma to initiate immediate political reforms and through the Asean Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) to effectively protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of the peoples of Burma such as the Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Assembly and Association.

The group cited ‘the use of child soldiers, the destruction of villages and the displacement of ethnic minorities, the use of rape as a weapon of war, extrajudicial killings, torture, forced relocation, and forced labour as among the crimes committed by the junta against the peoples of Burma.

To dramatize further the extent of rights abuses in Burma, FBC-Phils also staged a “parade of the victims” in front of the DFA office. “These rights violations happen on a regular basis in Burma. The UN must look into this consistent pattern of abuses and must seek an end to this,” Bans stressed.

A Commission of Inquiry could be an initial step towards ending the reign of impunity in Burma and deterring the regime’s future perpetration of widespread and systematic human rights abuses against the peoples of Burma, the group concluded. It will be remembered that UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Quintana, had called for such a commission when he reported to the UN Human Rights Council in March after a visit to Myanmar a month earlier.

On the occasion of the first State of the Nation Address of President Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” C. Aquino III, workers under the banner of the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) would march to Batasan to call on the president to unveil his government’s roadmap towards generating secure jobs for all.

“The unprecedented high trust rating of President Aquino is a clear mandate for change – for good government and pro-poor policies,” Daniel L. Edralin, APL Chairperson said. “As such, today we march with other progressive forces to ensure that the Aquino government would live up to its mandate,” he added.

To lift large sections of the working class from poverty, the APL is urging the president to adopt the Labor Agenda, a set of policy reforms aimed at promoting full employment, increased social services and social protection, labor justice and strengthened protection of labor rights.

“The only way to fight poverty is to end the unemployment crisis,” Daniel L. Edralin, APL Chairperson said. “Government needs to generate jobs, secure and quality jobs, jobs wherein workers’ and trade union rights are full respected,” he added.

According to government statistics, as of April 2010, more than 3 million are unemployed and 6.3 million are underemployed. Addressing the plight of the unemployed and the underemployed – which comprise a quarter of the labor force – requires thoroughgoing reforms in the country’s trade, fiscal, monetary and investment policies.

More importantly, it requires having a clear industrial policy. “To industrialize, we can no longer rely on the export-oriented policies of the past,” Edralin said. “We need to develop the domestic economy,” he added. It is for this reason that APL finds President Aquino’s 22-point marching orders for the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) short of what workers are expecting.

At the same time, we cannot develop the economy without a firm commitment to adhere to basic workers’ and trade union rights. To signal its commitment to workers’ and trade union rights, the APL is calling on President Aquino to fully investigate the trade union killings perpetrated under the previous administration.

“The climate of impunity must stop,” Edralin said. “It will if we put to jail those who are responsible for the assassinations of trade unionist, activists and journalists, including the perpetrators of the Hacienda Luisita massacre,” Edralin added.

The country is a signatory to ILO conventions, specifically Convention 87 or the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize Convention. Pending before the ILO is ILO Case No. 2528, where a total of thirty-nine (39) cases of extrajudicial killings of trade union leaders, members, organizers and union supporters and informal workers are alleged.

The APL will march in the NCR, Cebu, Davao and General Santos. In the NCR, the APL, together with Akbayan, will march towards Batasan in the morning. In the afternoon, APL will link up with the Kowalisyon Kontra Kontraktwalisasyon (KONTRA), Freedom from Debt Coalition, and Kampanya para sa Makataong Pamumuhay (KAMP).

ADDING its support to the possible appointment of Loretta Ann “Etta” Rosales as the new head of the Commission on Human Rights, the Alliance of Progressive Labor dismissed all the fuss about the former Akbayan solon as mainly prompted by the worldview of some quarters that rejects anything and everything not to their liking.

In particular, the Akbayan-Citizens’ Action Party said that the opposition to the selection of Rosales “was motivated more by ideological biases against her and Akbayan rather than by a sincere effort to make (CHR) more efficient in promoting human rights and securing justice for the abused.”

Akbayan, which is now assured of at least two seats in the incoming 15th Congress after an impressive showing in the recent May 10 party-list election, added that Rosales “has shown objectivity and openness in dealing with the intricacies of human rights and has repeatedly proven her firm and steady resolve to pursue and defend the people’s rights and freedom.”

APL cited Rosales’ long track record in championing various facets of democracy and human rights, including labor and trade union rights and national sovereignty, through her deep involvement in different mass organizations since the heyday of the Marcos dictatorship – from teachers’ union and alliance to national multisectoral coalition to political groupings to human rights advocacy networks and to NGOs.

One of the tens of thousands of human rights victims of the Marcos regime, Rosales also became a political prisoner and was tortured and abused by her military captors.

Rosales was also the very first Akbayan congressional representative after the party won a seat in the first ever party-list election in 1998. She eventually served the maximum three consecutive terms, from the 11th to the 13th Congresses or from 1998 to 2007. She is now the party’s chairman-emeritus.

During her nine years in Congress, Rosales earned both the respect and fear of allies and foes, respectively, for her no-nonsense stance for progressive legislations and social advocacies as well as fierce criticism against corruption, patronage politics and many forms of abuses from within and outside the government, including her former comrades and even current colleagues in the broad Left movement.

For her all-encompassing activism and engagements, including her eventful chairmanship of the then House Committee on Human, Civil and Political Rights, Rosales gained not only many supporters and admirers but likewise virulent enemies and critics, ironically both from the state-security establishment and a segment of the Left.

This might partly explain, the APL said, the well orchestrated objection of several closely allied organizations to the supposed “offer” of President Aquino to Rosales – which she herself clarified as not yet final or still “unofficial” – to become the successor of ex-CHR Chair Leila de Lima, who’s now the Justice Secretary.