Heavily funded state agents and local officials were tagged as masterminds in trade union busting in the Southern Tagalog region, home to numerous foreign companies.
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report that it had found state agents and members of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) harassing labor leaders and branding them as insurgents.
“Local officials and members of the police or military repeatedly visit the homes of union leaders and officers, and threaten action against them for allegedly being members or sympathizers of the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines,” the HRW said in its Sept. 26 report.
The HRW report was based on interviews with 14 labor leaders and workers in Southern Tagalog. It echoed findings in the 2024 Global Rights Index, which tagged the Philippines as among the 10 worst countries for working people for eight years now.
There is “no guarantee of rights” in the country, with workers and unions “(remaining) at the mercy of red-tagging (being blacklisted by the government as a communist subversive and branded an extremist), violence, abductions, and arbitrary arrests” the Index report said.
The NTF-ELCAC has been notorious for red-tagging activists, journalists and students. The well-funded government agency, created by then President Rodrigo Duterte in 2018, funnels funds to barangays to clear them of NPA influence.
The Marcos administration has rejected earlier calls to abolish the task force.
HRW also reminded foreign companies to protect their employees’ rights or “they risk complicity in abuses.”
“Companies doing business or whose supply chain partners are in the Philippines should consider risks and adverse impacts of red-tagging on their employees as part of their human rights due diligence process,” the report said.
NTF-Elcac’s red-tagging
“Red-tagging,” or the practice of linking individuals to the communist insurgency, is a common tactic of officials to silence critical individuals. The Supreme Court has declared that “(l)abelling a person ‘red’ often comes with frequent surveillance, direct harassment, and in some instances, eventual death.”
The HRW report described how policemen and soldiers, accompanied by barangay officials, would allegedly go around the villages of prominent labor leaders allied with the dominant leftist national labor organization Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU). Sometimes, it’s plainclothes men riding in tandem.
They would knock on their doors and warn them against joining KMU’s activities.
Noel Baron, the union president at Ebara Pumps Philippines Inc., told HRW that government agents have repeatedly harassed his union when it started promoting workers’ rights. “They would accuse us of using union activities to support the NPA. If we don’t abandon the KMU, they said, they would find evidence to show our links to the NPA.”
For his part, Debie Faigmani, president of the Wyeth Philippines Progressive Workers Union, “estimated that men in civilian clothes and uniformed police and soldiers had visited at least 14 officers and members of the union,” according to the HRW report.
“They lost morale and their spirits were dampened by these house-to-house red-tagging (incidents). People were just scared and many became resigned to the inevitable,” Faigmani told the rights’ group.
If the union leader is out of the house during the visit, state agents would pass the message to family members or badger them into divulging their loved one’s contact information.
“My children were told to tell me not to join the unions and its activities. My mother was traumatized as well,” said Oliver Muya, the vice president at the Nexperia Philippines Inc. union. He thinks that authorities are targeting the wives and children too “because they knew the emotional toll it could create.”
Authorities also went beyond the house visits.
Muya said that NTF-ELCAC members, the police, the military, and local officials were “influencing” elections in his union. Repeated invitations of more than 100 union members to barangay offices was a common practice, Muya claimed. “They’re trying to isolate KMU so it makes it easier for them to bust the union.”
In the case of Gardenia Philippines Bakers’ Union, there was an instance where three uniformed soldiers appeared in an employees’ meeting. “There the soldiers tried to discredit activist unions, accusing them of working with the NPA,” the HRW stated.
“They were just trying to intimidate us because we’ve been demanding better wages. But we’re not afraid because I know what we’re fighting for is just,” said Gardenia union leader Ricardo Bagasko.
The HRW documented “more than a dozen recent cases of harassment or threats by government officials or security forces” based on the interviews with the union leaders and workers.
World’s worst for workers
The HRW report on Calabarzon showed snippets of incidents that happen across the country.
In a report to the International Labour Organization in 2023, trade unions documented 33 cases of red-tagging of at least 70 workers and labor activists mostly by agents of the Philippine National Police, Armed Forces of the Philippines, and NTF-ELCAC from 2019 to 2022.
In some cases, private companies allegedly colluded with government agents in harassing their employees who were union members.
Red-tagging incidents transpired across different regions, too, with a heavy concentration in the National Capital Region (Metro Manila) and Calabarzon. Nine of the 33 cases happened online.
The trade unions’ report also mentioned five cases of abductions and enforced disappearances and 41 cases of arrests and detentions from June 2019 to January 2023.
The trade unions noted that 26 workers and labor activists were “extrajudicially killed” in the same period. After their report was submitted to the ILO, four more killings transpired. KMU has recorded a total of 72 killings of union leaders and members since 2016.
“It’s clear to us that the Philippine government is using red-tagging to prevent workers from organizing and unionizing,” said Jerome Adonis, KMU secretary-general.
Steps forward
Baron and other union leaders in Calabarzon reiterated calls to abolish the NTF-ELCAC by filing a case in the Commission on Human Rights in August 2023. It has been pending since.
NTF-ELCAC is allotted P7.8 billion under the 2025 National Expenditure Program submitted by Malacanang to Congress. The bulk will go to 780 barangays cleared of communist insurgency.
HRW deputy Asia director Bryony Lau is also putting pressure on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to direct officials to end the abusive practice of red-tagging and “ensure that government authorities uphold the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively.”
Companies should “ensure protection of workers on site against harassment and should call on authorities to end the practice, both directly and in cooperation with others, to avoid being complicit in these abuses,” HRW added.
There is a pending bill in Congress aimed at penalizing red-tagging and harassment of labor unions and workers’ associations. House Bill 9429 or the proposed Strengthening the Freedom Workers’ Act was passed on third reading in November last year.
Its Senate counterpart, Senate Bill 2735, has been stuck at the committee level since July. — PCIJ.org