blame my gun

(O huwag mo kalabitin ang aking gatilyo)

"The lesson today is how to die..."
Which Strange Little Girl would you be?
You have a strong sense of justice, and believe that ultimately people should pay for their crimes.

Tears of a contractual worker

It's not uncommon to sometimes find myself fighting back tears while interviewing people for my stories that have exploitation and oppression as common themes. Of course, I always struggle to maintain composure as journalists ought to, not because I subscribe to the vain theory that writers have to "distance" themselves from their subjects, but because one has to keep the mind alert in order to compose a clear picture of the situation being expressed. But today, when a contractual worker of a textile factory, Roselyn Bogsangit, suddenly shed tears over joblessness, a most common plight faced by millions of Filipino women, tears of sympathy unexpectedly sprung up from my own eyes. Everyday tragedy is just as painful to watch as national tragedies like landslides, stampedes, bombings, and political killings.

Roselyn, 27, is a knitter of clothes exported and sold to international labels such as Gap, Banana Republic, and JC Penney. For 8 up to 12 hours a day she stands in front of a machine, manipulating thread and needles, given only two fifteen-minute breaks and a one-hour break. Her hands and fingers are sore with small cuts. She gets paid P325 a day, already considered high among the usual wages for contractuals in textile factories. But in the span of her three-month contract, she reckons that she only got to work for a total of 30 days. Most days she spent at home, waiting for a call from the company, desperately hoping that there is work to done. Now that her contract is over, she is out of work and gloomy, knowing full well that she is over the age preferred by companies hiring contractuals (up to 25 years old).  She is unlike her relatively bubbly co-worker, Jay Anne Dionisio, 22, who still possesses the gift of youth and thus can afford to take her end-of-contract blithely, claiming that she can find work in some other factory she has applied to. Jay Anne has been working in factories and department stores on a contractual basis since she was 18. She knows no other way of life than looking upon the crumbs of opportunity thrown at her by capitalists as blessings. She reacted to the prospect of regularization laughingly, as if one were offering her a role in a surreal koreanovela: "Kung makukuha ako na regular, eh di, salamat." But for Roselyn, a mother of a three-year old child, her experience as a contractual was sobering: "Akala ko ire-renew yung contract ko, yun pala last day ko na." She had come to the factory hoping for more liberative work, after years of being employed as household help, shackled to her amo and barely knowing rest. But now she finds herself staring into the cruel depths of the sea of joblessness with desperate eyes. Nitz Gonzaga, a veteran organizer of women workers under Kilusang Mayo Uno, prodded them to join the May 1 Labor Day protests. Jay Anne said she would see. Roselyn said she would come.

My discussions with Ka Nitz, a union organizer since the 80s, were very enlightening. While before she was able to cultivate many leaders from the ranks of women workers in various factories (mostly textile and electronics) in Metro Manila, these factories have closed one after the other since the 90s, particularly after the Philippines entered the GATT-WTO in 1994. "Sa una hindi mo mapapansin eh, pero ngayon ramdam na ramdam mo na yung epekto ng globalisasyon sa unyonismo." Those factories that survive have laid off regular workers and instead increased contractuals to save costs as well as to prevent workers from joining unions and asserting their labor-related rights. Thus, unionized workers have been reduced to insignificant numbers that capitalists and the ruling class in general rejoice in. Thankfully, the trade union movement is slowly learning to skirt around the capitalists' wily ways and heave from the workers' shoulders the burden of isolation, ignorance and fear that globalization has crushed them with. Instead of concentrating on factories as focal points for organizing, they are now going the communities, the homes of workers and their families and there plant the seed of hope from which their future class emancipation would spring.

So good luck to the trade union movement, to Jay Anne, who has years to go before she sheds her first questioning tears, and to Roselyn, who has wiped away hers and started to look for answers.

posted by: ilangq at 14:56 | link | comments (2) |
oda sa pangkaraniwan

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