Militant Philippine Unions Said to Rely on Guerrilla Support

With his company’s starch factory deeply embroiled in a bitter strike that has left this remote farming region destitute and desperate, Jesus Madrinan was taking no chances as he drove the 35 miles to the provincial capital of Bohol Island last week.

Madrinan, the vice president of Philippine Starch Industrial Corp., hired two police bodyguards to ride shotgun. And he told his driver to speed.

Nonetheless, just a few miles from his factory, a band of Communist guerrillas stopped Madrinan’s car at gunpoint. They politely motioned for him to get out and told the policemen and driver to continue driving.

The rebels then shot Madrinan eight times in the head, a killing, their leaders later claimed, that was meant to support “the Filipino workers’ struggle for justice.”

The killing in a region that, until recently, had known none of the violence associated with the 18-year-old Communist insurgency plaguing President Corazon Aquino’s Philippines, both shocked and frightened the 100,000 residents of Carmen and its six surrounding towns. Here, 70% of the population are cassava farmers entirely dependent on the Philippine Starch factory for their financial survival.

But even more, Madrinan’s murder, which still has not been reported in the national Philippine press, is symbolic of a crucial behind-the-scenes trend in the nation’s labor movement, according to the police and labor experts. They say it was just one small part of an increasingly militant campaign by organized labor in the Philippines, where restive, anti-government trade unions appear to be depending more and more on the armed support of the Communist New People’s Army to enforce their labor actions.

As the nation’s leftist labor unions intensify their activism both in the rural provinces and in Manila, this trend toward militancy has left Aquino facing her potentially most devastating crisis.

The president says that only massive new investment will save her deeply indebted and impoverished nation from becoming Asia’s newest economic basket case. But foreign and Filipino investors are more afraid than ever to take the chance on a country where many experts say it is becoming increasingly costly--and dangerous--to do business.

Gasoline Price Boost

This week, Aquino made a decision that gave labor even more ammunition against her government: Citing pressure from rising international oil prices, she raised the price of gasoline by 18%.

Within 24 hours, metropolitan Manila was paralyzed by a one-day transport strike that stranded tens of thousands of commuters and forced the city government to deploy 40 garbage trucks with military escorts to help ferry workers home. Already, higher oil prices have touched off increases in the price of electricity and are expected to fuel a new round of inflation.

Twenty new strikes broke out at factories throughout the country, bringing to 61 the number of strikes in progress this month.

And on Friday, the most radical of the national labor alliances, the May First Movement, has scheduled a protest march on Aquino’s palace. Protest leaders say they will condemn Aquino for the gas price increase and repeat their longstanding demand for a 10-peso-a-day increase in the country’s minimum wage, which still ranks among the world’s lowest at 57 pesos ($2.85) per day.

Aquino has appealed for calm and understanding. She has tried to reassure businessmen by citing figures showing that the number of strikes are actually down compared to last year, when the nation saw virtual chaos from organized labor in the months after the overthrow of President Ferdinand E. Marcos. Marcos had used his dictatorial powers to forcibly suppress unions for more than a decade.

But Aquino’s critics and independent labor analysts insist that the president has been too concerned with statistics to recognize the underlying trends in the leftist labor movement. “Cory Aquino does not see the big picture,” said Blas Ople, a highly respected technocrat who served as labor minister to Marcos for 18 years.

Referring to the recent rash of militant strikes by the May First Movement, Ople added, “All of this is part of preliminary exercises of the urban-insurrection approach of the Communists, which will build up to a climax. By 1990, the Communist Party of the Philippines plans to create a situation where it can paralyze the entire national economy. And if they continue at this pace, I do not doubt that they will succeed.”

Deny Communist Ties

The May First Movement, which uses the native Tagalog language for its official name, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), is the nation’s fastest-growing labor federation. Already, it is the second-largest, claiming 700,000 members. But its leaders have officially denied many times that the movement is affiliated with either the banned Communist Party or its military wing, the New People’s Army.

In an interview Wednesday, the movement’s spokesman, Nick Elman, whose title is “secretary for popular struggle,” again denied the accusation.

“We are in no way connected with the Communist organizations or the New People’s Army,” he said. “But in several picket lines, there are people supporting the workers. They are people who are giving food and money to the strikers, but we do not always know who these people are.”

Still, the union’s rhetoric has grown increasingly militant and anti-government. Many of the movement’s leaders assert that Aquino has proved that she is no more concerned with workers’ rights than was Marcos, who banned 5,640 trade unions by presidential fiat in 1977 alone, when martial law was at its strictest.

After this week’s petroleum price boosts, the union’s chairman, Crispin Beltran, declared that Aquino’s government “is simply bent on keeping workers’ wages low and enhancing the already huge profit-take of oil monopolies. This inequitable, anti-Filipino policy is no different from that pursued by the deposed Marcos dictatorship.”

When Aquino took power from Marcos during the popular, military revolt in February, 1986, she announced a policy of reconciliation with labor. She appointed Augusto Sanchez, a political progressive and supporter of militant labor, as her Cabinet minister for labor affairs. She appeared last year at the nation’s first, free celebration of the May 1 International Labor Day in decades, declaring herself a friend of the “oppressed worker.”

But this year, Aquino did not attend the May 1 festivities. More and more, in the nine months since a chairman of the May First Movement, Rolando Olalia, was tortured and killed in a still-unsolved slaying, the president has been the target of the militant union’s attacks.

Despite the union’s denials, military intelligence authorities insist that they have gathered ample evidence of a link between the May First Movement and the country’s powerful Communist organizations.

“I would say the infiltration (of unions by Communists) is still going on, and there is information that cannot be revealed publicly that the KMU is already an infiltrated organization,” declared Aquino’s armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, during a breakfast forum two months ago.

Ramos and other military leaders added that the movement’s great power is not in its numbers alone, but in its ability to shut down factories or even entire business sectors through strategically planned strike actions.

Labor experts agree that the strategy of leftist labor has, indeed, shifted to work slowdowns, which further erodes Aquino’s claim that the country’s labor situation has improved in the past year.

According to the Department of Labor, the number of strikes in progress during the first week of August is less than half the 86 strikes that were pending in August, 1986. As for the year to date, the department said that a total of 53,925 workers have been involved in job actions, a 58% decrease from last year’s total of 128,114 for the same period.

For veteran labor analysts such as Ople, though, the figures are deceiving.

“A good number of strikes and job actions are unreported because they consist of work slowdowns and mass leaves,” Ople said. For Ople and other professed anti-Communists, the infiltration of labor by Communist organizations and the accompanying increase in labor militancy are part of a significant shift in the strategy of the radical political left.

Until two years ago, the Philippine Communists relied on the strategic models of Mao Tse-tung. Armed Communist guerrillas in the rural Philippine countryside worked with political propagandists to organize entire villages and towns in a protracted struggle that eventually would encircle the urban areas, isolate them and ultimately force their leaders to cede control.

Already, Aquino’s military concedes that the Communists have gained such influence in a full 20% of the nation’s 42,000 villages. But, in an apparent effort to speed up their campaign, the Communist leadership has shifted its strategy to more of a Leninist approach in the past 18 months, military intelligence analysts said.

“It is clear from the confiscated Communist documents that the military has shown me personally, that the strategy is now to organize the proletariat in the urban areas and stage a series of major protest actions with the ultimate aim to paralyze the entire economy through a national strike,” Ople said. “It is the Leninist extreme weapon.”

The strategy is not applied only in Manila, where the majority of the leftist labor actions have taken place. In the nation’s second-largest city of Cebu, dozens of work slowdowns and strikes have hurt several business sectors. They also have triggered a right-wing backlash in which so-called citizen vigilante groups have kidnaped and killed labor leaders and fired randomly on picket lines.

Now, the violence and turmoil of the labor disputes have reached such remote town centers as Carmen, an isolated semi-urban municipality of 30,000 in the center of Bohol Island, 400 miles south of Manila.

A poor town where farmers live on a narrow margin, Carmen and its surrounding region depend solely upon the starch factory to buy their cassavas, a root-plant used to make starch and tapioca. The factory was shut down by the strike at the peak of harvest season, Carmen Mayor Alfredo Galan said. Now, the entire annual income of thousands of families are simply rotting in the fields.

“We were desperate, so I cabled the Department of Labor’s regional office,” Galan said. “But they refused to come to Carmen to arbitrate the strike. They said everyone had to travel to Cebu (another island five hours away by boat) if we wanted their help. Well, the company officials refused to go, and here we are, just dying.