Labor discord, 1950-2000

Last week, preparatory to considering recent developments regarding both wings of the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, this column began viewing the history of disunity within the labor movement up to the 1950s. Let’s now deal briefly with the following half-century.

The outlawing of the communist-led Congress of Labor Organizations led to the formation of many “moderate” trade union organizations, some of which were prey to CIA influence. However, healthier organizations were also formed. As early as 1952, Cipriano Cid founded the Philippine Association of Free Labor Unions (PAFLU), and by 1964 this was claiming 121,000 affiliated members. The Philippine Trade Union Council (PTUC) was born in 1954, and that same year Ignacio Lacsina left the Jesuit-led Federation of Free Workers (FFW) to form the National Association of Trade Unions (NATU). The Katipunang Manggagawang Pilipino (KMP, Filipino Workers’ Association) was formed in 1957, participating in the nationalist campaign led by Claro M. Recto and supporting President Carlos P. Garcia’s “Filipino First” policy.

In 1963, an attempt was made to form a Philippine Labor Center by bringing together the PTUC and the KMP, which claimed to be the two largest federations. According to Jose Maria Sison writing in the Progressive Review a few years later, however, this attempt at unity “did not prosper beyond the paper agreement as if the hidden hand of the reactionaries had always been there to sabotage it and also as if the petty jealousies among the member federations could not at all be overcome.”

At the height of the anti-communist suppression in the 1950s, the printers’ organization, Union de Impresores de Filipinas, long associated with the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), had been largely inactive, but in the 1960s it revived and later in the decade would join with the Philippine Government Employees’ Association and dissatisfied member-unions within PAFLU to form the PKP-led Pambansang Kilusan ng Paggawa (Kilusan or National Workers’ Movement).

But NATU was considered to be the largest trade union organization in the late 1960s as, having significantly expanded its membership, it transformed itself from a federation into a labor center (the line between the two is often blurred). Late in the decade, it found itself caught up in the political differences on the left for, having been associated with the PKP (of which Lacsina was a member), after Jose Maria Sison broke away to form the CPP the NATU leader for a brief period went with him but then, following differences with the Maoist leader, renewed his links with the PKP.

Come 1972, of course, martial law transformed the labor scene, as strikes were banned and several progressive labor leaders were arrested. The declared aim of the Marcos government was to restructure the labor movement, bringing about a greater degree of unity. For a time, the PKP, which in 1974 entered into a political settlement with the regime, supported this, but it withdrew that support when it became apparent that Marcos had in mind a top-down exercise over which the membership would have no say. What emerged in 1975 was the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP).

In these years, the CIA-influenced Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI, with which the TUCP in particular was allied) and organizations supported by the Christian Democrats of West German like the Friedrich Eburt Stiftung exerted considerable influence over the larger federations (in 1970, Marcos’s labor secretary Blas Ople had recommended that a $427,000 program by the AAFLI be scrapped due to the CIA connection).

New opportunities for unity arose in the second half of the 1980s when Augusto “Bobbit” Sanchez, Corazon Aquino’s labor secretary, pulled the rival centers together into the Labor Advisory and Consultative Council to advise him on labor matters. Thus, all the major centers — the CPP-influenced KMU, the PKP-influenced Katipunan (both of which had been formed in 1980, the latter replacing the earlier Kilusan) the left-of center Tupas and Natu, the conservative TUCP and Federation of Free Workers, and the centrist Lakas ng Manggagawa Labor Center — for a time sat around the same table and began to cooperate.

This was, however, a fragile unity. The TUCP was the first to bolt when its demand for greater representation was resisted by the other centers. Tupas (Trade Unions of the Philippines and Allied Services) suffered an internal split in 1988 with the formation of the February Sixth Movement (FSM). The KMU, meanwhile, was often found “raiding” the other centers, particularly the TUCP, for members, and this led to violence by both sides, with the vigilante groups which proliferated in the Aquino years sometimes being deployed against the KMU. Furthermore, the movement was still divided in its international affiliations, with the TUCP affiliated to the pro-western International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the Katipunan, NATU and Tupas linked to the pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions, while the FFW was part of the Catholic-led World Congress of Labor.

Even so, by working together in 1989 the labor movement succeeded in gaining an inflation-busting P25 legislated increase in the minimum wage — although the legislation contained a sting in its tail by regionalizing the minimum wage. This brief period of unity was brought to an end in 1990 when the welgang bayan of October saw the burning of buses by the Alex Boncayo Brigade.

This was a huge setback for labor unity, but the situation would become even more confused and discordant. In 1993, the CPP split, and while there were initially just two major groups in the breakaway camp, Manila-Rizal and the Democratic Bloc, the former of these would split again, to be followed by splits among the splits, with each breakaway feeling it necessary to have its own labor federation or center. We’ll subject this phenomenon to closer scrutiny next week. –Ken Fuller, Daily Tribune

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