PHILIPPINES IS HUNGRY, NOT JUST FOR FOOD, BUT MOST OF ALL FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

PHILIPPINES IS HUNGRY, NOT JUST FOR FOOD, BUT MOST OF ALL FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

The exploitation of the Philippines, integrated into the world economy 400 years ago as a colonized and oppressed nation, continues today; millions of Filipino workers travel abroad as the cheap labor force for developed nations and transnational corporations continue to plunder the country for its mineral and natural resources. The national government, beholden to the interests of foreign capital, wages a ruthless counter-insurgency against the widespread opposition to its policies of trade liberalization, privatization and deregulation.  Yet in local communities across the Philippines people are organized into a powerful movement for health, human rights and liberation. 

Today, 27 years after the downfall of Marcos Dictatorship, the working class continues to suffer from the tyranny of economic injustice and political marginalization.

Despite modest economic growth these past few years, the gap between the rich and the poor continue to widen as workers’ share in the country’s income shrinks. Chronic unemployment, massive underemployment and the rampant use of contractual labor have condemned wide swatches of the population to live below the poverty line.

Meanwhile, the elites have once again proven their inability to govern democratically as the working people are marginalized from any meaningful participation in decision-making.

In all these years, workers are kept poor and powerless by a repressive labor relations system imposed by an anachronistic Labor Code that was imposed by the Marcos dictatorship in 1974 not so much to guarantee workers’ rights but to circumscribe it.

At 10.8 percent of the country’s GDP [gross domestic product], the migrant workers are the third- biggest source of the country’s foreign currency reserves and act as primary driver for our economy.

Despite these, however, the Philippines remains grappling in poverty, with nearly a quarter of its 90-million people living on $1 a day. Nearly 10 percent of the population, however, directly or indirectly, rely on their relatives working abroad, now pegged at 10 million in 239 countries and territories.

In fact, 30 years of outward migration and exporting Philippine labor has not made the Philippines prosper much. It only prevented the Philippines from dire economic straits.

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