Comrades in the struggle, fellow delegates and friends!

 

I am honored to address the Third International Assembly of our League – the International League of People’s Struggle. Our chosen theme is most timely and relevant: "Strengthen the People’s Struggle, Unite to build a New World against Imperialist Aggression, State Terrorism, Plunder and Social Destruction”.

 

In line with this theme, our distinguished chair of the International Coordinating Committee, Prof. Jose Maria Sison, invited me to prepare a 15-minute presentation on the subject “Neoliberal Globalization and Labor”.  Of course, I could not refuse the invitation from a person of such steeled commitment.

 

Professor Sison, as you all know, is a victim of intensifying political persecution by governments allied with the sole superpower of the world. For what reason? This is because of his consistent and unrelenting leadership and solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world against imperialist  domination and local reaction.

 

 As for my humble self, I was illegally arrested and detained by the Philippine government for more than a year only to be released last July 2007 after the Supreme Court dismissed with finality the false charge of rebellion  against me and other co-accused. To date however, together with other elected people’s representatives and progressive leaders and activists in the Philippines, we are still facing newly fabricated charges of murders and sedition cases in local courts. Nonetheless, the fight will go on!

 

Although part of the Philippine legislature, I came here not as a government representative but as a people’s representative. I will present the impact of neoliberal globalization on labor from the point of view of the working class and myself as   a worker .

 

Workers Impoverishment and the Global Crisis

 

The facts speak for themselves: falling wages, eroded incomes, massive unemployment, job losses, displaced workers, labor rights violations, trade union repression, violent attacks as well as social, economic, political, cultural and human degradation. The dignity of human labor, of social labor, has never been as downtrodden as it is under neoliberalism. The folly of the so-called “free trade” has not averted a global crisis but accelerated and intensified massive destruction of the productive forces and brought forth crisis on a global scale: the oil and energy crunch, debt squeeze, recession, chronic depression, financial crisis, precarious food security, environmental degradation and human misery never before seen after two world wars.

 

Trade and investment liberalization, privatization of public assets, social cuts and successive structural adjustments and deregulation have brought about unprecedented accumulation of wealth and finance to a few who are the elite of monopoly-corporations, banks and corrupt governments. But the rest of the world, barely surviving under sub-human conditions mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, suffers unspeakable hardships.

 

According to understated official figures, there are already close to 190 million unemployed workers in 2007 compared to 187 million in 2006. The International Labor Organization (ILO) in its Global Employment Trends expects that, with the global slowdown, five million more workers will be unemployed this year. Moreover, the ILO estimates that some 487 million workers live on less than $2 per person per day and 1.3 billion workers on less than $1 a day.

 

The service sector now provides 42.7 percent of the world’s jobs, compared to agriculture which provides only 34.9 percent thus affecting such basic human need as food security. Growth in industrial employment has been slow after the downward trend between 1997 and 2003. The service sector has been bloated largely due to the “financialization” of the economy,  especially the use of credit to finance consumption and deficits in trade and budget.

 

While figures for productivity is improving, real wages and labor shares (national income accruing to labor) are dwindling. Workers are made to work longer hours, under worse conditions and with bigger social cuts or no benefits at all.

The IMF, in its World Economic Outlook for this year, studied the global labor supply and the integration of the world. But it could only meekly suggest to governments three things: fix the labor market, provide education and training, and give so-called “social safety nets”.  The Millennium Development Goals in eradicating poverty and hunger and providing “full employment” is  just a tokenistic and rhetorical program under the United Nations. The UN itself admitted that about 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes.

 

Conflicts and Resistance

 

Imperialism, global finance and government-sponsored wars are having their feast over the backs of oppressed peoples and nations, neocolonial and dependent countries and even former socialist countries turned-capitalist. However,  imperialist states are  engaged in cutthroat competitions and are taking advantage of each other in a struggle for a redivision of the world..  They are bitterly fighting for sources of cheap raw materials and labor, markets, fields of investment and spheres of  influence. The crisis of overproduction is becoming worse as monopoly capitalism presses down the wage levels and the incomes of all working people and consequently the markets keep on shrinking. F This is happening in the imperialist countries,   the so-called “emerging markets” like China and India and in all the underdeveloped  countries. 

 

But even more striking are the rising waves of mass mobilizations and protest movements across the globe – labor unrest and workers’ struggles included. Even inside capitalist countries, the epic struggle between labor and capital has come to resurgent historic proportions.

 

As the crisis of neoliberalism intensifies, so are social and political storms brewing all over the world. Hitherto unpredicted, workers’ strikes and militant movements against the existing economic and political order are breaking out  on a wide scale..

 

Just this April, at least 15,000 Bangladesh garment factory workers went on strike south of Dhaka calling for higher wages to cover for rising food prices. Monthly wages averaged only $25.

 

More than 20,000 Vietnamese workers walked off the job at a plant making shoes for Nike demanding a 20 percent wage increase amid soaring inflation.

Workers rallied in Bangkok to press for a minimum wage of about $7.5. The benchmark Thai rice price already reached $1,000 a ton, a threefold increase in just a year.  In Indonesia, airport workers staged strikes in five airports last May over salaries, pensions and health insurance.

 

In Turkey, 530 demonstrators were arrested and 38 injured as police dispersed a May Day rally which was planned to bring 500,000 people into the streets led by labor unions representing 3 million workers.

 

In Nigeria, oil workers at Exxon Mobil went on strike as negotiations over wages and working conditions broke down. In Johannesburg, municipal workers press for better pay and work conditions in a strike this May. About 700,000 public workers staged a nationwide strike last year demanding a 12% pay hike. In Lima, Peru, workers went on strike at a metal facility processing iron, zinc, copper, silver and gold.

 

In Athens, Greece, a two-day strike protested plans to sell a telephone company to Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG. More than 700 Boeing workers walked off the job in Melbourne defying government's order to return.

 

In Egypt, about 127,000 textile workers stopped work in a publicly-owned company where wages and bonuses could not cover for expenses.  Migrant workers in oil rich Middle East are striking: 2,000 construction workers in the UAE earning less than $200 a month; 3,000 migrant workers sewing for Classic Fashion Apparel, paid only $31 a week when they should be receiving $64 while routinely working 12 to 14 hours.

 

Thousands of steel workers stormed a factory in eastern Romania demanding a wage increase of at least $123. In France, after the nationwide transport strike last year before their new government's plan on pensions, everybody seems to be striking -- restaurant and tire workers, bus drivers, undocumented migrant workers, port workers whose jobs were privatized in 1992, and many more.

 

More than a thousand oil workers in Scotland, supplying 40% of Britain's crude oil is shut down by a union strike. Even oil workers in US-occupied Iraq went on strike in Basra.  In Canada, striking employees at the Toronto Transit Commission protested the contracting out of work.

 

In the US, the writer’s guild went on strike for more than 14 weeks over negotiations with media giants.  Six weeks into the strike, 60% of the public were on the side of the strikers according to polls.

 

After 37 long years, the United Auto Workers went on strike against General Motors in about 80 U.S. facilities. Their issue: job security.

 

Problems in the Workers’ Front

 

There are, however, serious challenges facing the laboring masses. A narrowing industrial and agricultural based employment is displacing millions of people. Trade and industry lines are being de-industrialized. Processes and services are outsourced or off shored in pursuit of super profits. With declining industries, the World Bank and other big international banks are up in a race to corner the precious remittances of migrant contract workers spreading all over the world.

 

Trade unions used to be the centers of or staging grounds of workers’ struggles. But under flexible labor, or flexible terms of working conditions, we are all witness to the dwindling numbers, strength and legal rights of unions – even of global trade union centers and net-based networks. (I need not mention here of the ICFTU, now the ITUC, and the WFTU.)

 

As an aside, let me cite the 98th session of the International Labor Organization this year. Its tripartism of governments, labor and employers has served as a mere mechanism to align national legislation, industrial relations and workplace contracts to the ILO’s more than a hundred conventions.

 

Neoliberalism has further whittled these down to the so-called “core standards” under a tattered banner called “decent work”. What decent work are they talking about under the wage-slavery of capitalist profit and imperialist super profit? The same rabid exploitation persists even under the so-called "post-industrial" and information-based high-technology digitized age. While the social character of labor has become even more pronounced under globalization, so does private appropriation of wealth become even more intensified.

 

Labor is holding on to its unions -- local, national, and international. But it is barely holding on with aristocratic, compromising and yellow leadership. The militant unions, on the other hand, are under attack. Scores of workers and activists are being killed along with thousands more. In the Philippines alone, there were 80 unionists killed from January 2001 to March 2008. But state authorities would always say “ah, but the killings are not labor-related” and when these are reported to the ILO it  echoes the same myopic, bureaucratic and callous line behind sterile technical terms.

 

In Colombia, for example, the capitalist banana growers used the reactionary state and rightist paramilitaries to unleash an extraordinary wave of violence to crush the leftist unions. They also used the rightists and opportunists within the unions under the so-called plan of reforming the global banana trade to the advantage of the Colombian capitalists and to the detriment of  the workers .  By the 1990s, a new right-dominated union in Urabá sold out the workers through  labor-management collaboration.  Over a thousand labor activists have been killed since then.

 

Pro-imperialist intellectuals and  NGOs  offer formulas like: “we can be a non-state, a non-governmental actor; we can be a social partner to progress; let’s have team-building, conflict-management, do affirmative actions, or hold a multi-colored or cross-border summit or conference, and hold a social dialogue with the concerned state agencies and implore upon them the corporate social responsibility of business; big business are environment-friendly, you see, why fight them” – these NGO lingo and catchphrases only mislead the workers, grab the leadership, go on junkets, and get the funding using the workers’ issues.

 

We do not shun real social dialogue , but how do we dialogue with truncheons, water cannons, and bullets? When workers themselves are being killed and third world union leaders are hunted down by state police and hired goons? When sweatshops, from the maquiladoras to the export zones, from the mines and farms and factories, only produce more hunger?

 

 “Social movement unionism,” hacked and coined to weaken militant unions has become a “third way” for others. Some are sponsored by social democratic parties and other reformist institutions and groups with  state support. Yellow trade unions and labor aristocrats have made serious compromises with governments and big business. Some concessions were won but these are gradually taken back. Social reformism falls flat on its face before the tyranny of monopoly finance capital.

 

Struggles to Change the World

 

But all are not just about wages, jobs and labor rights. Globalization issues are coming to the fore in workers’ actions. Workers, peoples and nations are resisting and fighting back, not only against the adverse effects but to root  out the fundamental causes of the neoliberal crisis. Oppressed peoples and nations are not only seeking to improve their working and living conditions but are waging all forms of struggles in order to change the world they live in.

 

In South Korea, about 1,000 actors, directors and movie executives staged a demonstration to condemn the government's decision to slash screen quotas for domestic films. The decision was made under the pressure of the United States, which set the screen quota issue as a precondition for free trade talks.

 

In a bold display of class solidarity, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) declared an eight-hour strike last May Day to protest the war in Iraq. The ILWU controls every port along the U.S. Pacific Coast. The ILWU demanded "an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East."  The strike demonstrated the collective power of workers.

 

In India, major central trade unions are calling a general strike in August 20 to protest against the “fallout of the anti-worker, anti-people neo-liberal policies” of the government. In the Philippines, militant workers’ movement despite political repression are active on all fronts of the struggle against oil price hikes, power rates, food crisis, corruption, and poverty and are linking these issues altogether as bases for the movement to “oust” the president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

 

Meanwhile, a growing number of nations are asserting their sovereignty. The Venezuelan  struggle to unshackle themselves from foreign-domination and develop a self-reliant economy through nationalization of vital industries is setting a good example for the unity of the government with the people against foreign corporate power. Cuba is leading the way in its steadfast stand to move towards socialism even as it parries U.S. threats of aggression, double embargo and countless assassination and destablization attempts. The armed revolutionary liberation movements in several countries like India, Colombia, and, in my own country, the Philippines, where the people want liberation from semi-feudal and semi-colonial system, are giving heavy blows against the reactionary state.      

 

Labor, more exploited and oppressed under neoliberal globalization, must encompass and reach out not only to industrial workers but also those in agriculture, services, migrant labor, the “informal” sectors, the marginalized young workers, women workers and the jobless, rural and urban poor, unionized and non-unionized. We must reach out to them, not only in their workplaces and industrial zones, but also in their homes, in communities, streets and public places.

 

We must mobilize them not only for economic welfare issues but also for political and national issues and link them with the aspiration of the entire people for national freedom and democracy. Struggles waged in various parts of the globe, in our own countries are real expressions of the workers’ international solidarity against a common enemy – monopoly capitalism and state terrorism.

 

Labor facing the onslaught of imperialist degradation must have the ideological, political and organizational strength beyond that of trade unions. Workers must take the lead through their revolutionary parties and together with the other oppressed sections of society  they must carry out  democratic political struggles against exploitation and oppression, against imperialism and local reaction. We are all learning to fight back. And despite old age rushing up on some of us, we are indeed kept young and feel the strength so long as we are one with our peoples’ struggles.

 

As we hold this assembly, let us match our fighting words and resolutions with the firm determination to forge greater unity and muster greater militancy against imperialism. With this assembly, we affirm our commitment to arouse, organize and mobilize the masses of our people! Only thus could we strengthen our struggle. Only thus could we build a new world of genuine social and human progress for our peoples!

 

Salute to the militant working class!

Strengthen unity among oppressed peoples and nations!

Long live the International League of People’s Struggle!

 

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