The Philippine was a colony of Spain for 400 years and is named after King Philip of Spain. It is a small Asian country with a population of 65 million people distributed in 7 thousand islands. The biggest of these islands is Mindanao - the base of agricultural plantation.The Philippines has a total workforce of 21 million. Of this only ten percent is unionized. Of the unionized, roughly 60% have existing collective bargaining agreements.
The daily minimum wage industrial workers is P119. It is P92 for regular plantation workers, contract workers receive much lesser - P40 to P70 a day. Although the cost of living of an average has been calculated in P238 per day (P25 = $1)
In the 50s and 60s, multinationals Del Monte and Dole invaded the vast and fertile agricultural lands in Mindanao and established the world's biggest pineapple plantations. This was followed by banana plantations in the late 60s, dominated by such transnationals as the Dole, United Brands, Chiquita and Sumitomo.
Acquisition of lands for these transnationals aggravatted the inequity in Philippines society where 10% owns 80% of the agricultural and pasture lands and where 80% of the people live below the poverty level.
Many small farmers-landowners were induced to sell their lands to a government corporation which, in turn, leased these lands to transnationals at a token fee. The farmers were promised gainful employment in the company, only to be dismissed for triffle reasons. In the process, many landless tenants lost the lands they have been tilling for a long time.
Rouyed by huge profits and expanding markets in Japan, Hong Kong, the Middle East and South Korea in the 70s the banana industry grew so rapidly from a handful of companies with 3 thousand hectares and 5,000 workers in 1968 to today's 22 companies, 120 thousand hectares and more than 60,000 workers. Less than half of these workers are regular, the rest are contract workers, who, under Philippines laws cannot be unionized.
On December 13, 1995, all the more one thousand regular workers of two banana companies will be laid-off and replaced by contract workers. In recent years, more than eigh thousand regular workers suffered the same fate. Come 1996, more regular workers will follow. With this rapid contractualization of plantation workers, unionism in the plantations may become extinct.
Mass lay-offs is done for a number of reasons: competition, cost cutting, productivity, profits, cheaper labor. The mother of these is the capitalist greed for profits.
But in the Philippines, there is one other reason. It is land.
In June 1988, the Philippine Congress passed the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL). This law opened an opportunity for plantation workers to own plantation lands leased to or owned by transnational and big landowners-growers. But under the law only regular farmworkers are qualified to become agrarian reform beneficiaries. For this reason plantation owners lay-off regular workers and replace them with contract workers.