KMU affirms the ILO CAS’s conclusion: that all violations of workers’ freedom of association and collective bargaining rights lie in the Marcos government’s policy framework first, and in its implementation second.
This anti-worker, anti-union framework exists because it is useful – useful to capitalists who profit from cheap labor, from workers too precarious to organize, prevented from launching strikes to defend our rights.
The Philippine government, in collusion with capitalists, has built and maintained a legal framework that serves their shared interest: uninterrupted superprofits at the expense of our welfare and dignity.
The Philippine government speaks of “constructive social dialogue” and “meaningful engagement.” The record says otherwise. Not a single pro-worker law has been enacted under the Marcos administration. Demands for a National Minimum Wage and living wage are buried in Congress while employers continue to profit from a wage rationalization system designed to suppress, not raise, the cost of labor. Pro-worker legislation is shelved, watered down, or killed in committee. The laws protecting freedom of association and collective bargaining are actively violated. Organizers are harassed. Certification elections are sabotaged. Workers who dare to unionize face retaliation and dismissal. This is not negligence. It is deliberate.
Multinational corporations operate in the Philippines not despite our low wages and weak union rights – but because of them. The fragmented wage-setting system, contractualization, the Assumption of Jurisdiction (AJ) are not quirks of local policy. They are features of an economic order designed to keep labor cheap and compliant for foreign capital and its domestic partners.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the Herrera Law. It undermines our right to strike and hands the Labor Secretary unchecked power to intervene in disputes through AJ orders to our detriment. It must be reviewed and repealed, and replaced with stronger measures that actually address our needs.
This is why we push legislators to file bills – including House Bill 9649 (Repeal AJ Bill) and House Bill 9650 (Hands Off Our Unions Bill) – and why we push for the repeal of BP 130 and BP 227, draconian Martial Law-era laws that violate our union rights.
But our fight does not get easier. The world of work is changing fast. We are forced into platform work, contractualization, and informal arrangements designed to obscure employment relationships and deny us our rights. Behind every “partner” label, every fixed-term contract, every gig arrangement, is one of us being denied what we are owed. We need protections that are dynamic, adaptive, and real – because we, in all forms of employment, deserve union and bargaining rights. No exceptions, no exemptions.
We demand a full and transparent investigation from the Department of Labor and Employment into all trade union and human rights violations suffered by our ranks.
We know better than to wait for the system to fix itself. We know that a government which prioritizes corporate profits over our welfare; which is operated as one big enterprise by those in office; which serves not only local elites but the broader imperialist interests that keep our economy dependent and our workers disposable; which redtags, arbitrarily arrests, disappears, and kills our fellow unionists under the banner of “counterinsurgency” – will never hand us our rights.
So we must take them. Organize. Build our ranks. Strengthen our movement – in the Philippines and across the globe. We are all thrust into precarity and poverty wages to feed the same system of superprofit. This system depends on our division and fears our unity. Only our organized power can answer the organized power of those who exploit us. And that power is ours to build.
