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Published: February 10th 2008
Hinji Strike
The Hinji picket line. Most of these people sew Gap jeans destined for North America for the Korean garment company. I guess going through a Korean company allows Gap to hide its use of cheap Filipino labor.I spent the last of this week on a quick exposure trip to Southern Tagalog. Though I am still finding the geography a little hard to follow - Canada has a few BIG provinces, while the Philippines has a TON of little provinces - I am almost positive that Southern Tagalog is the area at the bottom of Luzon, including the island of Palawan. The organization I am working with right now thought it was important for me to see this area because it is one of the areas with the heaviest military presence in the country. In fact this region has the second biggest military presence bested only by Mindono, the area suspected of so much Muslim terrorist action.
My trip actually started in Manila, because there is a group of about 70 internal refugees living here who have been forced to move here from Southern Tagalog for fear of military violence. These are all families that have experienced the abduction and torture of one of their members by the military and police. The almost 40 children living in the house are loud and full of life; screaming, laughing and playing from dawn until dusk. They were excited to
listen to me speak English and to play with my digital camera. Though their situation has been extremely painful and these people are now essentially prisoners inside their safe house they where amazingly open with me in sharing their stories. One women was abducted and held for 10 days, being tortured and berated for information about the New People's Army (the armed communist rebels in the country). She has never had any connection with the rebel group, but had been an active farm organizer. She said that even though the military had harassed her before abducting her she had continued to organize the farmers, because she wanted to see a day when they would have a fair distribution of their crops. Currently the farmers in her area get 30% of what they grow while the landlords get 70%. She was working with an organization advocating for a fifty-fifty split. Though she did not believe that she would ever be able to go home a gain she was keen to come out of hiding and start organizing again. Like many people I talked to she felt that only organized people would be able to change the severely corrupt, pro-capitalist system in
Police Intimidation
The police parked their car in the space at the gate designated for the picket line to intimidate the stickers. Far from being intimidated, the strikers built the car into their picket line. the Philippines. I spoke with another women in the safe house who was about 63. She had also bee tortured for 10 days. Her "crime" had been advocating for the urban poor in her city. She was very clear in making me understand that she had been abducted just after her community organization had started to make some headway against the planned demolition of whole squater communities. Laughing she told me that she had been blacklisted during the Marcos dictatorship because of her activism, but only under the current government had she ever been abused so violently.
It has been said to me numerous times in the past week that the current Filipino government is worse then the Marcos dictatorship. Who would have thought that anyone in this country would think about that violent dictatorship nostalgically. Marcos at least declared the Martial Law, letting people know that his was a violent and repressive regime. Gloria Arroyo is operating in an undeclared state of martial law, she is pretending to the rest of the world that things like human rights and democracy are normalizing here, and yet her regime is more violent and repressive to activists then Marcos ever was.
There have in fact been as many extra-judicial killings in her 6 years as President then there where in the entire 20 years of the previous dictatorship.
I spent time this week talking to numerous people whose loved ones had been killed for their activism under GMA. One women told me that living in the middle class she hadn't really known anything about what was going on in the country before her daughter was shot in 2001. Her daughter had been an active student journalist and human rights advocate, but all behind her family's back because she knew they would disapproved. The women, now about 45 and petite was angry with her daughter at first, but in trying to get justice against the military men who killed her began to realize how many people are abused daily by the government and military. She has now begun working full time as an activist to fix some of the problems she sees in her own society and to honor her daughters memory. Laughing she told me about how she was okay with having been kicked out of her "born again Christian" church for her activism, she said that she was tired
The Amazing Strength of Children
I didn't take many pictures of the Internal Refugees when I was living with them. I have seen them numerous times since though, and have deepened my relationship with these warm families, especially with the kids. A friend of mine is working with an NGO here that is also trying to help the IRs and he has taken some phenomenal shots of them. I wanted to share some of these tremendously strong and beautiful children with you - they have managed to stay children even as they been forcibly radicalized to the violence and poverty in their country. of healing and evangelizing people anyway. She talked with passion about the battles waged in the old testament against repressive regimes and about Jesus as an activist. She said that she would continue fighting for her and other Filipinos right for as long as she was able. When I asked her if she was scared she laughed again. "Of course I am scared," she said, "but in mobilizations I march up to those police officers in their riot gear with as much fearlessness and ferociousness as I can muster. If I don't they would laugh at me and tell me that I was too old to fight." Their passion and dedication has been more inspirational to me then I think I can really express.
I slept two night of my exposure in picket lines. I have the swollen nic-nic bites all over my feet and hands to prove it. (Nic-nics are the Filipino equivalent to midgets in New Brunswick. And just as in NB midgets are drawn to me and regardless of how much bug spray I am wearing, so are the nic-nics here.) The first picket line was new. The workers are striking against a Korean garment factory
that was paying them below minimum wag and firing anyone who talking about unionizing. All of the people on the picket line have been illegally dismissed for their attempt to form a legal union. The morning before we arrived the picket line had been violently dispersed by about 100 cops with riot shields and sticks. The strikers and their supporters might have been about 50 strong and where entirely unarmed. Four of the strikers where arrested and detained on charges of assault against the police. When we arrived the piket line had moved to city hall to demand the release of the strikers. When the local government gave in to the pressure of the mob on their lawn we moved back to the garment factory and set the picket line back up. This time there was no violence, though lots of police surveillance. I got a chance to talk to many of the striking workers who would be hosting me that night. Over rice eaten out of plastic bags sitting on sleeping mats on the pavement they told me that they where being paid between 185 - 260 peso a day to fulfill a quota of 1002 gap jeans. That
The Amazing Strength of Children
These kids love the camera. When I see them now I usually give them my camera and a lecture about about using the wrist and let them go to town. They could look at themselves on camera for hours on end - they are hilarious hams. is about 3-5 dollars Canadian a day. I shamefully admitted to them that I had a pair of gap jeans in my bookbag and that they where expensive to purchase in Canada, meaning that the company was making a lot of money off of their labor. Seeing all of these people determined to take the real risk of violence and harassment and death from the police for defying the company and striking I promised them that I would never shop at gap again. How could I support company who would go to so much trouble of keeping their labor field cheap and docile? I felt the same way the next day arriving at the Nestle picket line.
Nestle is is the biggest producer of milk based products in the Philippines. And it is the largest food producer globally, with about 7000 brand names under its heading. About every 3rd commercial on Filipino tv is for a Nestle product. The strikers I met now have a permanent picket line across the street from the factory, in space donated by a women who watched them struggle against the violent dispersal of their first few temporary picket lines. The workers actually had a union, but every time they went into collective bargaining the company continued to push them farther and farther to give up things the union had gained in previous years. The final straw was over retirement benefits. The Supreme Court of the Philippines decided that it was right and legal for the union to have retirement benefits. But in 2001 Nestle management told the union that it would only continue to acknowledge them if they deleted retirement benefits forever from their Collective Agreement. The union went on strike and built their picket line along beside the gates of the company. Their picket line was met with whole units of police in riot gear, water cannons and tear gas. I watched a documentary made by the union that showed numerous scenes of regular people, women and elderly workers, being dispersed by close range fire hose. I just keep thinking how proud I am in my parents involvement in our volunteer fire department in Canada, and how they would never willingly be involved in dispersing strikers like the fire departments so often do here. The union President, a man with so much passion in his voice, told me that he was not scared of the military and the police even though they killed his two predecessors. "I would rather starve fighting then starve doing nothing." Nestle has been powerful enough to blacklist all of the strikers and their family members, so that none of them can get a job in another factory in the city to support them during the strike. As a result of 6 year strike most of the families have broken up, many people have gotten depressed and many have moved out of the country and away from their families to work overseas. These people continue to fight though, bolstered by the fact that the Supreme Court continues to find in their favor and order Nestle to go back to the bargaining table. Nestle, however, is powerful enough in the country to ignore the Supreme Court decisions and to have a contingent of police based within their factory for surveillance and protection "against" the strikers. It makes me wonder how much money Nestle has put into bribes for government and police officials in order to not have to give a fair wages and benefits to their employees.
My trip to Souther Tagalog was emotional and eye opening. I don't know how people in the Western world can avoid supporting these multinational corporations. They have become so adept at hiding their illegal activities and misdeeds. They have made it as hard as they possible can for people to know exactly where they are producing their goods and exactly how they are treating their workers. In the Philippines this deception is continuously aided by government officials and operatives. But we are the ones with buying power, and as a result are the only people who can make Gap or Neslte stop abusing their workers.
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Aries and Rinka
Aristeo Rinka Lucea
Thank you!
We need people like you in our country. Fresh out of college, I worked 3 years for the government and various NGO, for poverty alleviation, but sad to say I was disillusioned and very disappointed. Doing the right thing in a system accustomed to corruption can be pretty tiring. I was exhausted and my idealism died with it. The people in government and sadly even NGO workers are just devising scheme to enrich themselves and not really trying to work on solving the issue of poverty. I have been living abroad for the past six years now. I still pray that a real change will occur in my country, sadly though I can only wish to become a part of it. I just have to thank people like you. You are such an endearing person.