Despite Attacks by Guards and Thugs, These Factory Workers in the Philippines Remain on Strike

The banner reads: “Regularize contractual workers!” Photo Credits: ST Exposure

By Karlo Mikhail Mongaya
Workers who produce popular alcoholic beverages owned by the Philippines’ second richest man are currently on strike, demanding regular jobs and better working conditions. Despite attacks by security guards and thugs reportedly hired by the employers, the strikers have continued their work stoppage for more than a week now.

The Tanduay Distillers Inc. plant (which is located in Cabuyao, Laguna, 44 kilometers or about 27 miles south of Manila) hires contractual labor through the agencies Global Skills Providers Multi-Purpose Cooperative and HD Manpower Service Cooperative.

Contractuals are temporary workers who are not given standard labor benefits. Many companies in the Philippines engage in contractualization to lower the cost of their operations.

According to the labor union Tanggulan Ugnayan Daluyong ng Lakas-Anakpawis sa Tanduay Distillers Inc (TUDLA), these two agencies engage in labor-only contracting or the hiring of contractuals to do work that is essential to production—an act prohibited by law.

For the past 5-11 years, 90 percent of the total workforce at Tanduay Distillers Inc. (a total of 397 workers) have been contractual workers.

Striking workers hold program at the picket line with their families and supporters. Photo Credits: Kilusang Mayo Uno.

Responding to the contractual-worker issue, Tanduay’s employees formed TUDLA on April 16 and filed a petition for regularization with the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). However, the contractual workers were suddenly made to sign a one-year service contract when the company has not previously required them to sign any contract.

On May 16, Saturday, hundreds of workers were told that they would not be given any schedule for contract signing. In other words, they were already out of work. On May 18, Monday morning, workers decided on the spot to launch a strike. Daily updates about the work stoppage are available on Kilusang Mayo Uno-Southern Tagalog's Facebook page.

According to TUDLA, Tanduay workers create an estimated 15 million pesos ($336,000) worth of beverage products every day. Company owner Lucio Tan, the man listed as the country’s second richest by Forbes Magazine in 2014, has a net worth of 270 billion pesos ($6.1 billion).

Tanduay workers, meanwhile, earn a measly P315 ($7) a day, and government reforms are expected to lower that figure to P255 ($6) a day. The culprit is the Philippine government’s new Two-Tiered Wage System, a so-called productivity scheme that labor groups say is a legal mechanism to drive down the wages of workers outside of Manila.

Tanduay workers also complain that they cannot avail of paid time off (for sick leave or vacation), medical and other benefits, or even bonuses. Not infrequently, the union says, employees are suddenly and without explanation dismissed from their jobs.

The company reportedly hired local toughs and private security groups to disperse the striking workers and their supporters. The violent dispersal was caught on camera by multimedia group ST Exposure.

Protesting Workers Dispersed  by Lucio Tan's Ruthless Hired Goons

From day one of the strike, the company’s security personnel and other muscle reportedly working for cash have harassed and even harmed the striking workers and their supporters. Dozens have suffered injuries from beatings. And yet the extremely exploitative conditions have pushed the workers to persist with the strike and their fight for just wages, benefits, and job security.

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.

The Solution to Racial Unrest in Ferguson?: Missouri Republicans Say Destroy the Unions

Missouri Republicans think the answer to racial unrest in Ferguson is to bust unions and leave workers at the mercy of employers.

By Brendan Fischer
The protests that erupted in the wake of 18 year old Michael Brown's death at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri police officer in August have many causes, ranging from longstanding tensions between the largely African-American community and a largely white police force, systematic targeting of people of color fueled in part by revenue-driven law enforcement practices, residential segregation, and disparities in racial power arising from under-representation in local government thanks in part to Ferguson's unusual elections calendar.

Yet a leader of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Missouri, House Speaker Tim Jones, says he has the solution to unrest in Ferguson: bust the unions.

Missouri Digital News reported Wednesday that: "Republican Speaker of the House Tim Jones said the legislature could pass right-to-work legislation and that would instantly help economic development in and around Ferguson.

'One of the biggest things we can do is become the 25th right to work state in the country and give workers freedom. Missouri is now an oasis of big labor influence and power. If you look at a map of the country, we're nearly surrounded by states that have gone to worker freedom states.'"

On twitter, Jones confirmed that his remarks were not taken out of context:

House Speaker Jones was the ALEC co-chair for Missouri until this year, and is a member of the ALEC Education Task Force. He has also been an unapologetic birther, and joined a 2009 lawsuit seeking to have President Obama removed from office on grounds that he was secretly an Indonesian named Barry Soetoro.

__________
Brendan Fischer is CMD's General Counsel. He graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Reprinted with permission from PRWatch.

Under-the-Table, Off-the-Books Work: The Scary Economic Trend Making Americans More Job-Insecure Than Ever

By Lynn Stuart Parramore
They’re stuck in pieced-together part-time gigs and often getting paid off-the-books. Too discouraged to look for regular jobs, these are the inhabitants of what trendwatchers are calling the “gray economy.” In California alone, their numbers, which include many freelance workers, are 6.2 million, or over 16 percent of residents.

Like a dismal cloud spreading over the sky to blot out the sun, the gray economy is trapping millions of Americans in a dark world of haphazard and insecure jobs, few or no benefits, nonexistent chances for advancement, and little recourse if they get screwed.

As Tiffany Hsu explained in a recent LA Times report, measuring the extent of this economic netherworld is challenging:

“It's hard to track the growth of the gray economy because so many employers hide workers for tax purposes. Experts generally agree, however, that the ranks of the underemployed swelled during the recession — more than in past downturns — and have remained substantial in an unsteady recovery.”

Some experts fear this is more than a cyclical change, it's evidence of a more fundamental shift toward job insecurity. This shift appears to be driven by a myriad of trends and policies, from globalization to outsourcing to shareholder value ideology which focuses corporate attention to short-term profits and stock market manipulation. These factors, plus the decimations of unions and the giant Wall Street-driven economic shocks which create high unemployment, have shifted power away from workers and toward employers who seek their short-term advantage no matter what the social and economic costs. Starting in the '70s, the lifetime career at one company gradually shifted to a less secure full-time job, then work as an independent contractor, and now, finally, to under-the-table work.

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Why Big Business Loves Desperate Workers: Work Starved Employees Can Be Underpaid, Overworked and Abused in Other Ways

Photo: flickr/cc/ Matt Wetzler

By Stephen Pimpare
We don’t think enough about the economic functions of social welfare policy, or about the relationship between the safety net and labor markets, and this hinders our ability to make sense of why some people fight so hard against programs that aid poor and low-income people: We mistake them for anti-welfare ideologues, and dismiss them as cruel or ignorant, but there’s an economic logic to their activism, one that’s revealed if we look at the relationship between welfare and work from both the employee’s and the employer’s perspective. Let me explain.

Imagine that we have two workers, worker K and worker O, each with two young children.

Worker K is laid off when the company “downsizes.” K is nervous, but has some savings, is eligible for Unemployment Insurance benefits, Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), and TANF, has access to free local day care, and lives in a Section 8 apartment, with their monthly rent tied to their income.

While K is not living as well as when working, if K were eligible for all of these programs, which would be highly unusual, K will be able to get by. K can pay the rent and buy food and remain insured and with some belt-tightening, will be okay for a while.

Worker O, by contrast, is fired, even though O didn’t do anything wrong. O is therefore ineligible for UI. O has no savings, cannot afford insurance, even with a subsidy through the Affordable Care Act, is not eligible for Medicaid or food stamps or TANF, has no reliable, affordable day care, and has no access to a housing subsidy. As a result, O is in trouble, and is desperate and perched on the edge of homelessness.

Now, let’s turn our attention to an employer with a job to fill, Z. This job is terrible. It’s minimum wage, has no health benefits, no paid days off or vacation time, has irregular hours -- some weeks you’ll need to work days, some weeks nights (and you won’t know in advance so you can plan), and you'll get 20 or maybe 30 hours each week, if you're lucky. There’s no opportunity for upward mobility, it’s a two-hour drive each way, with no reliable public transportation to get you there, and the working conditions are unsafe -- there have been lots of injuries there. As I said, it’s a terrible job.

Employer Z offers unemployed worker K the job. What’s K’s answer? It’s no, of course. Maybe even hell no. Does K say no because K is lazy? No. K says no because this is not a job that will help K raise a family and move up the ladder, and taking it would mean being unable to look for something better, among other things. It is rational under these circumstances, smart even, to turn down this job. If you can. And K can.

Now, Z offers O the job. What does O say? O says yes. Maybe even yes please. Why? Because O does not have any choice. O is desperate. O is in no position to bargain, or to wait for something better.

It may be even worse than this, because there might be a worker called V who is even more desperate than O. So, V says: “I know you can’t legally pay me less than minimum wage, but if you hire me instead of O, I’ll come in early and work for an hour before punching in, and then after I punch out at night I’ll stay for an extra hour then too.” When workers are desperate, they bid down their own wages.

If you are a worker, would you rather live in a country where most people were in K’s situation, or in O’s? K’s, of course, right? Because in that world, with very generous social welfare benefits, you would have some security, and some bargaining power.

If you are employer Z, would you prefer to live in a country where most people were in K’s situation, or in O’s? O’s of course, right? Because in that world, with very limited social welfare benefits, workers would have no choice but to accept whatever job you offered under whatever conditions; in a world with very generous social welfare programs, by contrast, everyone would have the ability to decline work, and if you want to hire someone, the burden would be on you, the employer, to make the job more attractive -- you might have to offer higher wages, paid vacation or sick days, a regular schedule, health insurance, and opportunities for promotion. Many of those would mean lower profits.

This is why business and their elected allies fight efforts to expand food stamps or unemployment insurance or TANF. A desperate worker is a cheap and compliant worker.

So the next time someone is fighting against a proposal to increase the assistance available to poor and low-income people, take their objection seriously and ask, simply, who benefits?

_____________________
Stephen Pimpare is author of A People’s History of Poverty in America, winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and is currently at work on Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen. He teaches U.S. social policy and social welfare history at Columbia University and NYU. You can follow him on Twitter @stephenpimpare

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

Workers Who Make Your iPhone Possible Are Fighting Labor Abuse in the Philippines With Selfies and Hashtags

Protesting NXP workers break through the locked gates and march to the NXP plant. Photo Credit: KR Guda.

By Karlo Mikhail Mongaya
Suffering from low wages, contractualization, and indecent working conditions, many Filipino workers who create the microchips used for smartphones, tablets, and other tech gadgets rarely get to use the tools that they themselves have produced in the assembly lines.

Yet Filipino workers that have made our cellphone calls, text messages, social networking, and online activities possible are now using these gadgets to fight union busting and other labor abuses.

The #bringbacknxp24 campaign by workers from an NXP Semiconductors plant in Cabuyao, Laguna, is one fight that has effectively combined an active online drive with on-the-ground protest. Laguna is a province located south of Manila, the country's capital.

NXP Semiconductors is one of the world’s top 20 electronics manufacturers and supplies microchips and other parts for high-tech companies like Apple and Asus. In the Philippines, it employs over 1,600 regular workers and 1,700 contract employees.

Workers were demanding an 8 percent wage increase but management was only willing to grant a 3.5 percent raise during the negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. The workers organized collective actions on April 9, 17, 19, and May 1 – which are all government-declared holidays – but the management described these activities as ‘illegal strikes’ and cited them as a reason to dismiss 24 union leaders on May 5, 2014.

Internet meme urging support for NXP workers. From
Facebook page of the campaign.

The NXP workers have put up an online petition at Change.org and have gathered more than 500 signatures for their cause. The petition highlighted the demand of the workers for higher wages:

The fight of the NXP workers is a fight of all workers, of everyone. All of us need a wage increase that’s significant, not just morsels of alms. All of us deserve employment that’s regular, not just contractual. Many have already been dismissed from their jobs just because they asserted what’s due to them.

Chronicles of Carlos, a labor activist, explained that the online component of the #bringbacknxp24 campaign has shown the potential of social media in bringing labor issues to the greater public:

In around three weeks’ time, the Facebook page has drawn over 1,000 likes and boasts of active daily engagement among its base and outer circles – something unusual for a relatively unpopular campaign and for a labor issue in the Philippines at that. The inspiring thing about the campaign is that NXP workers themselves are the ones sharing updates inside the company. Just recently, a worker uploaded a photo of the latest company memo that tries to sow confusion among the workforce. In another instance, a worker uploaded a photo of the company’s anti-union message contained in a paper strip.

Image from Facebook page of ‘Bring Back NXP 24′

The social media campaign is also calling on netizens to post selfies with placards in solidarity with the NXP workers on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #bringbacknxp24. The workers themselves have posted photos of themselves urging public support for their fight.

Photo from ‘Bring Back NXP 24′ Facebook page.

The campaign to reinstate the NXP workers has gathered the support of various organizations in Europe, Australia, China, Hongkong, Taiwan, and the US. Photos of solidarity messages from these countries were posted on the official Facebook page of the campaign:

Belgian workers expressing support for the campaign.

A staff of the Asia Monitor Resource Center holding a support placard
for #bringbackNXP24.

The case of the NXP workers has already reached the central office of the country's Department of Labor and Employment. Negotiations are ongoing and workers are still appealing for more public support.

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.

China's Adidas Shoe Factory Strike and its Implications for Grassroots Democracy

Police and workers inside the Yue Yuen complex in April. Photo by CLB.

The strike at an Adidas shoe factory, the sheer scale of it and workers’ increasing skills of organizing strikes without bonafide union representation have created a renewed round of debate on how Chinese authorities will handle increasingly tense industrial relations in China

By Jennifer Cheung
The nearly two week-long strike at the Taiwanese-owned and Hong Kong-listed factory Yue Yuen (dubbed the largest factory in China since the 1970s) motivated 40,000 workers to join in, and was organised on the workers’ QQ groups, a Chinese online instant chatting tool. Both the government and the official trade union later acknowledged that Yue Yuen committed malpractice by failing to pay workers their full social insurance package, an illegal practice rampantly adopted by factory bosses to save labour costs, who usually do so with impunity. Therefore, it is difficult to estimate whether the outburst of workers’ collective discontent at Yue Yuen is the climax of industrial action in recent years, or just the beginning.

But the real question for the Chinese government is: what is the best strategy to cope with such wildcat strikes, which quickly become unmanageable? In Yue Yuen’s case, workers walked out of the factory compound and marched through nearby streets. Factory production was interrupted, and Adidas reportedly had to shift part of its orders from Yue Yuen to minimise the strike’s impact. The deployment of riot police and even military forces to threaten, beat, and detain striking workers, and the criminal prosecution of strike leaders, only politicised the industrial labour actions and created more tension between workers and the government, leaving the original labour dispute largely unresolved.

The factory unions are neither trusted by workers nor responsive to workers’ complaints before it is much too late. The enterprise union committee is usually made up of management, whose interests most of the time side with employers rather than with rank and file workers. In Yue Yuen’s case, workers interviewed by China Labour Bulletin said they never saw any union staff, did not know who the union chairman is, nor did they care about what their unions might have to say.

The official union controlled by the Communist Party, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), is often seen as juggling its roles of maintaining social stability and its rubber stamp function of representing the 270 million-strong migrant workforce. It has been busy rolling out union reform by allowing democratic elections in grassroots unions and has conducted some experiments and pilot projects in Pearl River Delta-based factories, but the efficacy of those reforms has various interpretations. Both the official union and the employer fear workers might elect the ‘wrong guy’, who would neither help the official union foster stability nor help the employer maintain a loyal and productive workforce. Last year, the democratically elected union chairman requested permission to resign due to pressures on all sides. Workers are not won over by the official union either. It is reported by The Economist that Yue Yuen workers tore up mediation letters sent to them by the government-backed union.

Labour NGOs that provide legal advice and collective bargaining training to workers are also in a friend-and-foe situation with the government authorities. On one hand, the government wants labour NGOs to help cultivate a skilled and educated workforce--in other words, a ‘manageable’ workforce; on the other hand, the government does not want these NGOs to stay too close to workers and become ‘trouble makers’. The ‘enforced vacation’ of labour rights advocate Zhang Zhiru illustrates this point. Zhang told Reuters he and another colleague at Shenzhen Chunfeng Labour Dispute Service Center were detained by security police when they were helping workers organise to press their labour demands. The security police tried to persuade Zhang to stay away from Yue Yuen workers, but Zhang refused. Zhang was then taken to a ‘vacation area’ in the suburbs of nearby Guangzhou, where he was confined to a room and cut off from external communications for over two days.

As the strike at Yue Yuen gradually recedes, Guangdong provincial trade union chairman Huang Yebin has told the Southern Daily that trade unions at all levels represent workers’ interests and have negotiated with the employer, who has agreed to pay workers their full social insurance package. Huang claimed by April 27, 90 percent of Yue Yuen workers have returned to work. But different noises are coming from some of the workers.

It remains to be seen whether the official trade union offer can satisfy workers’ demands (at least temporarily), and whether those demands will go beyond salary increases and pensions to include entitlement to self-governance and industrial democracy.

Historical insights in western countries such as the United States show that long-lasting labour unrest eventually forces governments to compromise and grant workers the right to set up independent unions with the right to collective bargaining. In China’s case, the party's state experiment in finding the best strategy to secure industrial peace, including democratic union elections, will also shed some light on how it is tlikely to achieve its unswerving priority of maintaining social stability in general.

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

Hey Google — Don't Be Evil: Shareholders and Activists Call for Political Spending Transparency, Climate Change Leadership, and Better Treatment of its Workers

(Photo by Clive Darra)

Groups Held Rallied Outside Google's Annual Shareholder Meeting  and Presented Shareholders With Proposals

By Public Citizen
Shareholders and activists from around the country and region [rallied] at Google’s shareholder meeting, calling on the tech giant to stay true to its stated commitments to transparency, an open Internet and climate action by disclosing its lobbying spending and leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – two powerful groups that oppose those values. They are also urging Google to support good jobs for subcontracted security officers on its own campus, many of whom struggle to make ends meet despite the company’s staggering wealth. Groups will be using the hashtags #DontFundEvil and #DontBeEvil.

This morning and the previous two mornings, activists handed out fliers to Google employees at bus stops informing them of the company’s prodigious political spending on lobbying and its funding of groups that oppose taking action on climate change. Advocates also shed light on the company’s footprint in the local Bay Area community, where the eviction and affordability crises are escalating as companies like Google draw more high-income people to the region without supporting the right of longtime residents to stay. In San Francisco, Google is also perpetuating a two-tier system that privileges private over public transportation.

A shareholder proposal filed by Walden Asset Management, Connecticut pension funds and others, calls on Google to disclose how much it spends on lobbying and how much it contributes to associations like the Chamber, by far the largest corporate lobbying group, and ALEC, which pushes corporate-friendly model legislation through state governments.

Rally participants included Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch, Forecast the Facts, Common Cause California, Eviction Free San Francisco, Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW), the Sunflower Alliance, Sierra Club SF Bay Area Chapter, 350 East Bay, 350 Silicon Valley, and the Raging Grannies. After the rally, activists planned to use proxies to enter the shareholder meeting to ask questions of Google’s top management and formally present the shareholder proposal.

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Silicon Valley Work Environments — Better Than Sweatshops?: "I Do Not Know One Person Who Is Happy at Amazon"

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com (Photo by James
Duncan Davidson)

"Amazon is an amazing company.
As long as you don't work here."

Several insiders at Amazon describe the company's bizarre and sometimes exploitative workplace culture.

By Hamilton Nolan

"Everyone is so tired, all the time"

I've been with Amazon for a little over a year and you can count my experience in the Ugly category.

This soulless machine looks down on employee work-life balance as "weak" and "uncommitted to the customer." I've got to hand it to them though. Amazon does put the customer first. Many other huge corporations make the same claim, but this company backs it up. The problem is that it comes at the expense of the employees, their health and their families. I've heard that the average employment of an Amazon corporate staffer is less than a year and a half. I am not sure if that is true, but it would not surprise me at all.

Think about how expensive it must be (financially and to their reputation, which are not so different in the long term) to lose hard-working, smart people at such a frequency. Trust, morale and institutional knowledge erode every day, only to be buoyed by the wide-eyed n00bs who start in their place. It is not long until those people get tired too, and so it goes. That approach to employee replacement cannot go forever. It is only a matter of time until the tech world runs out of smart people who believe it will be "different for me." (My theory: they bank on candidates from other countries who are not only unaware of the rumours, but who see the compensation as a windfall and don't care about the consequences.)

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