"The fight of the Zagu workers for regularization is a fight against a system that harms the entire Filipino working class."
"The fight of the Zagu workers for regularization is a fight against a system that harms the entire Filipino working class."
I enjoy my Zagu sago shake but not if it is produced and served in a cloud of social injustice.
This year, Zagu Food Corp. celebrated its 20th anniversary in business. Over the course of two decades, Zagu has turned itself into a major Filipino brand, its signature sago shake becoming a staple refreshment for millions of Pinoys all over the country. It should be just a matter of time before the brand goes global.
Unfortunately, that is not likely as we are seeing in the labor unrest that is rocking the company, including the way it has responded to its workers’ just demand.
It goes without saying that Zagu Food Corp.’s success is an outcome among others of the immense productivity of its workers—its drivers, machine operators, and sales staff. But have they benefited from the growth of the company?
Last week, on June 6, the members of the Organization of Zagu Workers—Solidarity of Unions in the Philippines for Empowerment and Reform began their strike, a response to Zagu managements’ attempts to bust their union. As told to me by a close relative who is one of the union organizers, ORGANIZA-SUPER is a legitimate labor organization affiliated with labor center Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino, and is composed of Zagu rank-and-file workers. These are the people who mix the raw materials, who deliver them to the hundreds of Zagu outlets all over the country, and who prepare and sell the shakes to the customers.
The impetus for the workers’ decision to unionize was the issue of contractualization. Zagu employs over 600 contractual workers as machine operators, drivers, warehouse staff, and service crew. Many of these workers have been with Zagu for more than a decade, and are still deemed contractual.
Zagu management has defended itself by claiming that these workers are regular employees of various “co-operatives” and manpower agencies, and that Zagu is only where they have been deployed. The union has rebutted this by pointing out that the agencies are not compliant with DOLE regulations, not even supplying their own equipment or supervisors in the workplace.
The workers decided to unionize so that they could fight for regularization through the proper legal channels. However, almost immediately after making themselves public, the union found itself under attack by Zagu management. Union members received threats that if they continued with their activities, they would be terminated. Zagu management began dealing out disciplinary memos to the union officers for things as frivolous as distributing educational material about the union to the other workers.
Since January, the union has tried resolving the issue through negotiations with management. However, after months of negotiation, management continued to lay the groundwork for mass termination of the union members. Seeing that the management were not negotiating in good faith, ORGANIZA voted to begin their strike.
As of today, ORGANIZA-SUPER has been on strike for more than a week. Since starting their strike, the workers have reported that they have been under constant attack and harassment by management staff, both on the picket line and online. Despite this, the workers are firm in their conviction that they are on the right side of this dispute, and open to negotiating a win-win settlement for both the union and the management. Indeed, it is management that has maintained a hard line in negotiations, even skipping one of the scheduled DOLE hearings.
Why should the average Filipino care about the Zagu strike? There is, of course, an ethical dimension to this issue. The fact that Zagu’s success is built on exploitative workplace conditions and the precarity of its workers should be enough to move us to action.
But more than this, the Zagu strike is a perfect example of the consequences of the trilateral work arrangement, where workers are “deployed” to businesses by manpower agencies that function as nonvalue-adding middlemen. So long as the government continues to permit trilateral employment, millions of Filipino workers will continue to toil in precarious work conditions without any security of tenure. And it is only natural that so long as these conditions exist, workers will fight back. That is why in a previous column I opposed the Security of Tenure bill passed by the Senate whose version was unfortunately adopted in toto by the House of Representatives. That bill sets us back years in defeating endo.
The fight of the Zagu workers for regularization is not just their own. It is a fight against a system that harms the entire Filipino working class. If the Zagu workers win this struggle, it would be a victory for all the victims of contractualization. A loss would only embolden those who seek to profit from denying their workers security of tenure.
It is in the interest of both the union and management to settle this dispute in a just and timely manner. Zagu management should return to the negotiation table, and ensure that its workers are treated with the respect and dignity that they deserve. Until then, it is up to the general public to put pressure on the management and support the Zagu workers in their struggle for their basic rights.
If that means boycotting Zagu products until they meet union demands, then so be it.
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