The Philippines is among top 10 dangerous place for workers in 2020 based on the 2020 Global Rights Index issued by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Associated Labor Unions-Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (ALU-TUCP) said Saturday.
Other countries in the top 10 are Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Honduras, India, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Zimbabwe.
“The ALU-TUCP) are fully in accord with the findings of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and stand by their listing of the Philippines as one of the top 10 most dangerous countries in the world for workers,” the country’s biggest labor group said in a statement.
“We see the handwriting clearly on the wall: workers rights and workers are and will be victims in the current political environment,” the labor group’s spokesman Alan Tanjusay said.
This, Tanjusay said, was considering the current state of labor relations policy during the quarantine allowing wage reductions and suspending labor rights inspections, the anti-labor and the anti-consumer program of the economic managers to raise anew excise taxes and opposing security of tenure, and the “dangerous political slide towards authoritarianism” evidenced by passage of the Anti-Terror Bill.
“There remains unresolved assassinations, allegedly labor-related disappearances, various repressions, red-tagging and wanton attacks on workers and workers’ fundamental rights that makes the current environment dangerous and difficult for workers,” the group said.
The ALU-TUCP also foresee the conditions to get even worse in the days ahead because of the current full operationalization of police and military offices in ecozones to combat what they describe as “radical trade unions”, the inevitable enactment and enforcement of anti-terror bill and the current aggressive push by business owners in cahoots with the economic managers for increased labor flexibilization, wage reduction and the lowering of labor standards — using the COVID19.
Tanjusay said it is the government that now makes the country more dangerous and more difficult place for workers to live and to work and as they are promoting unproductive and very dangerous class warfare.
“We urge our national government to listen to us and to remember the lessons to history. We plead to our national leadership to step back from the brink of this totalitarian temptation and accept the path of building back better by upholding our individual civil and political liberties, respecting our collective economic rights, and by putting our workers interests first. This is the path to saving jobs and saving lives.” he said.
The ITUC Global Rights Index depicts the world’s worst countries for workers based on the degree of respect for workers’ rights by rating 139 countries on a scale from 1 to 5. Workers’ rights are absent in countries with the rating 5 and violations occur on an irregular basis in countries with the rating 1.
