Cuisia gets dose of own medicine

NAMFREL chairman Jose Cuisia Jr. has been on TV lately bemoaning the refusal of the Commission on Elections to continue the accreditation of what started out as a US-funded National Movement for Free Elections as an election watchdog.

What many viewers do not know is that Cuisia, who is also chairman of the Asian Institute of Management, is getting his own dose of bitter medicine that he has been administering over at the AIM campus in Makati City.

The Cuisia-led AIM board has been fighting the accreditation of the AIM Faculty Association as a collective bargaining unit for the Filipino faculty of the region’s first MBA school since 2005.

Not content in going to the Labor Department to seek the dissolution of the faculty union, the AIM board also elevated the issue to the Court of Appeals to stop the certification election ordered by no less than Labor Secretary Marianito Roque.

But even as the Court of Appeals rejected AIM’s version of No-El (no election) scenario, the management bought time to defer the certification elections from March to October 2009 and then rushed its own “Dagdag Bawas” operation.

How?

Even management officials such as AIM president Edilberto de Jesus, dean Victoria Licuanan, associate dean Ricardo Lim, associate dean and former Labor secretary Nieves Confesor and associate dean and Indonesian Gracia Ugut were, like union members, included in the voters’ list.

To ensure that AIM will have numerical superiority, even part-time faculty members were rounded up and included in the voters’ list, padding the 28 full-time, non-officer faculty members to 53.

Come to think of it, even professor Nihal Amerasinghe, a Sri Lankan, was corralled into casting his vote. –Victor Agustin, Manila Standard Today