More than 50 trade unionists have been killed in the Philippines since Rodrigo Duterte came to power, according to a 2022 report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), a global trade union body. While trade union work is no glamorous job, it is simply more precarious in the Philippines, where assassinations of trade unionists are commonplace.
In 2021, trade union leader Dandy Miguel was gunned down by still-unknown assailants in Calamba, a city south of the capital Manila. Miguel was the vice chairperson of a worker center in the Calabarzon region and a national council member of the leftist trade union Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, May First Movement).
Prior to his murder, Miguel submitted a complaint to the country’s human rights commission regarding a spate of extrajudicial killings in Calabarzon that took the lives of nine labor and NGO activists three weeks before, dubbed as the Bloody Sunday massacre.
The killing of Dandy Miguel is by no means unique, unfortunately, and it perfectly captures the state of trade unionism in the Philippines and the threats of violence against workers’ organization.
Workers’ rights in the Philippines have always been poor
Since ITUC started the global workers’ rights index in 2014, the Philippines have always had an annual score of 5, indicating a lack of guaranteed rights for workers for over a decade. Beginning in 2017, after Duterte came into power, the Philippines have also been annually among the 10 worst countries for workers in the world.
With 48 million total number of employed workers, only 5 million belong to a trade union, according to the latest statistics from the labor department. This means that most workers in the Philippines have little to no organizational recourse in terms of their rights and welfare.
Despite this, Philippine trade unions are active not only in the economic dimension but also in democratic and multi-sectoral issues, as part of a broader civil society movement. Protests against Duterte’s policies, like on security of tenure for workers, have been led by trade unions like the KMU. Alongside this, trade unions also participate in the defense of civil liberties, like in their petition versus the country’s new terrorism law.
For many Filipino workers, trade unions are their first resort in seeking economic and democratic redress. They are at the forefront of representing the rights and interests not only of their members but of the Filipino working class as a whole. This means that any meaningful defense of Philippine democracy has the maintenance and defense of trade union rights as a prerequisite.
Marked increase in violent attacks on trade unionists
While the brutal opening salvo of the Duterte administration on suspected drug peddlers and users have already been rightfully covered extensively, buried within these drug war headlines are the murders of trade unionists that happened in parallel. At times, these issues intersected with each other, like the murder of Orlando Abangan in September 2016, among the earliest trade unionists killed. Abangan was also a staunch critic of the drug war. Less than a week later, transport unionist Edilberto Miralles was killed in front of the labor relations commission building.
In 2018, 9 striking workers in the sugar-rich province of Negros Occidental were killed while occupying the plantation they worked on. In response to these deaths, Duterte remarked that any further labor occupations will be met with violence, ordering the police and military to shoot occupying workers.
In 2019, Dennis Sequeña, trade union organizer and party-list nominee for Partido Manggagawa (PM, Workers Party), was shot dead in the province of Cavite, and Reynaldo Malaborbor in the province of Laguna, both in the aforementioned Calabarzon region.
Just last year, in 2023, veteran KMU organizer Jude Fernandez was killed in an alleged firefight with the police in the province of Rizal, Calabarzon. For its part, the police claims that Fernandez “fought back (nanlaban),” the same narrative used in Duterte’s drug war where victims were alleged to have fought back against the police, resulting to their deaths.
Violence against trade unionists was a consistent feature of the state of labor rights in the Philippines, as outlined by ITUC’s annual reports. On top of these murders, there are also multiple recorded instances of harassment and intimidation, arbitrary arrests, and forced disappearances.
It is important to understand that civil society was already on weak foundations prior to Duterte’s presidency, as described by Arugay and Baquisal. Developments in Philippine civil society during the Aquino administration put civil society organizations in an already weakened and fragmented situation. This position was further worsened, however, by Duterte’s targeted attacks on civil society, described by Arugay and Baquisal as the first post-Marcos presidency that “attacked civic space systematically.”
Shrinking democratic space for trade unions
The ITUC, in 2023, stated that a democracy in crisis is among the global trends for workers over a ten-year period. Democratic spaces for trade unions, as they are for civil society as a whole, have continued to shrink in countries around the globe.
In the Philippines, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and trade unions is being eroded by red-tagging, or the linking of legal, unrelated organizations to the country’s underground armed communist movement. Across civil society, both within and outside the labor movement, red-tagging is a frequent strategy used to undermine opposition actors, even employed by the state.
Red-tagging in the case of trade unions intimidate workers, discourage them from organizing trade unions, diminish the credibility of labor organizations, and put trade union leaders and members in danger. According to HRW, these instances of red-tagging increase during collective bargaining negotiations with employers.
For trade unions, the continuous shrinking of available space for organization and dissent means that they are not able to do their job effectively. Workers are effectively deprived of their elected representation since trade unions cannot sit at the negotiating table without fear for their life, limb, and liberty.
Trade unions and democracy under Marcos
A high-level tripartite mission (HLTM) was sent by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to the Philippines in January 2023, after years of delay. The mission was ordered by ILO as early as 2019 to probe the killings and other rights violations against workers in the Philippines, but the visit was delayed multiple times by the Duterte administration.
The HLTM found that despite official disavowal of red-tagging as a policy, statements provided by government agencies linking trade unions to the underground communists prove this to be false. The mission also stated that a climate of impunity clouds over the Philippines, resulting to a lack of resolution and justice for the staggering amount of union assassinations.
In its recommendations, the mission tasked Marcos to create a presidential body to identify the cases of violence against trade unionists and an independent body to investigate such cases. Marcos followed suit by enacting an executive order to create an inter-agency committee tasked with overseeing the freedom of association and organization of workers.
However, in a 2024 report, the ILO learned from the ITUC and other global unions that Philippine trade unions were not consulted by the government in the formation of the inter-agency committee, contrary to the ILO recommendation to involve them in the process.
Lamentably, murders and enforced disappearances of trade unionists continue well into the Marcos’ term. Since the HLTM left, the ILO raised alarm over the murder of call center union officer Alex Dolorosa, disappearance of KMU organizers Ador Juat and Loi Magbanua, and further disappearance of unionists Leleng Mungcal and Cha Cortez.
As of the publication of this article, William Lariosa, a veteran KMU organizer in the southern island of Mindanao, remains missing. He is suspected to have been abducted by military agents on April 10, 2024, the latest victim of violence against unionists under Marcos.
The future of trade unions and Philippine democracy
While only 10 percent of employed workers are organized into trade unions, their significance in Philippine democracy cannot be understated. For millions of workers, their trade unions are their avenues not only for economic interests but for democratic participation. The global trend of democratic erosion can be felt gravely in the Philippines, by civil society in general, and by trade unions who are at the receiving end of violence.
The defense of Philippine democracy as a whole entails the protection of the freedom of association and assembly for workers. Beyond the economic dimension of trade union work, workers are also at the forefront of democratic and multi-sectoral issues. The culture of impunity implanted by the Duterte administration would continue well into the future, killing trade unionists and eroding democracy, unless it is addressed and reversed, while there is still time.
Photo by Glenn Joseph Villarama, from Unsplash. Free to use under the Unsplash License.
This was a good read, Julian. You were able to shed light on the plight of trade unions in the Philippines and how the government’s persistent red-tagging is a debilitating threat to their right to organization, dissent, and, essentially, life.
It is important to note that the reason for today’s remarkably low number of unionists is that labor activists have been suppressed by previous governments ever since. Under Marcos dictatorship, strikes were highly restricted because Marcos Sr. issued decrees that outlawed all forms of strikes, lockouts, picketing, and other labor actions. Even after the fall of Marcos, labor groups continued to face challenges. While originally supported by Corazon Aquino, tensions rose as the government resorted to violence against unionists through intimidation, harassment, and killings. This is seen in the Mendiola Massacre in 1987, where state forces violently faced the farmers and union leaders who were calling for genuine agrarian reform; and the banning of Kilusang Mayo Uno, the largest trade union in the country, in 1990 by branding them as communists.
As such, extrajudicial killings, red-tagging, and anti-worker policies never really left but only worsened through the succeeding regimes, particularly those of Duterte and Marcos Jr. — and this is because they never strayed away from the neoliberal agenda that has shaped the country’s economic structure since the dictatorial regime. All of them were hellbent on the liberalization of the economy, privatization of state assets, and deregulation and denationalization of key industries – made possible by elite capture and railroaded through fascism. And it is clear that the enrichment of a select few corporations takes precedence over safeguarding the lives of many Filipinos, particularly workers and activists.