SIGNS OF COLONIALISM ARE EVERYWHERE IN MANILA—from the sixteenth-century Spanish buildings and gardens of Intramuros to the early twentieth-century Manila Hotel, an American icon on the harbor. Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s dot the traffic-choked avenues, fronted by vendors selling hot peanuts, their mouths and noses masked in white to filter the smog. American R&B songs from the 1970s blare from car radios, restaurant loudspeakers, and brightly painted open-air “jeepneys”—Manila’s version of city buses.
In Rizal Park at dawn, hundreds of women Zumba-dance to the beat of American pop icon Beyoncé. The music throbs above stone busts of indigenous leaders, most of whom died fighting the Spanish or the Americans. “The Americans did not just colonize my land,” says labor activist Josua Mata. “They colonized our minds.”1
Shadows of the 1940s Japanese occupation also hover over the lives of twenty-first-century Pinoys. Barbed-wire enclosures dot the Cavite and Bataan Peninsulas, the jaws of land that enclose Manila harbor. Where Japanese prisoner of war camps stood, there are now barracks of a different sort. Worker dormitories line the alleyways of the Mariveles and Cavite Export Processing Zones—semi-hidden, overcrowded, without light, privacy, and, often, even indoor plumbing.
The air in these zones is thick with fumes from factories owned by Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Philippine corporations. The Spanish fast-fashion giant Inditex has factories here too. But most of the clothing made here is for American companies, says garment union organizer Asuncion Binos. High-end fashion is produced in the same ways as fast fashion. Ann Taylor and Ralph Lauren, JC Penney and Gap are all here. The women workers sit at their sewing machines inside industrial zones patrolled by private armies.
“Organizing in Cavite Export Processing Zone, you see much harassment,” Binos says. “You also might see a dead person floating in the river. If they see that you are an organizer, they can make you disappear. That’s why most labor organizations don’t even try to penetrate the export zones. It’s too scary.”2
It is the new colonialism, says Mata. And everyone who works here knows it. Filipino workers are torn, Mata says. “The Spanish were here for five hundred years. Still, no one thinks of themselves as Spanish. But America eats at us from the inside.” There is the America whose musical rhythms reverberate in Filipino bodies and minds, the America where so many of their relatives live. (Much of Mata’s family lives in New Jersey.) And then there is a reflexive revulsion toward American colonialism that is so deeply ingrained it feels like blood and bone. The Philippine labor movement is soaked in that feeling of resentment, Mata says.
In the twenty-first century, the struggle against colonialism has morphed. The old oppressors are still around. A few Filipino families, many of Chinese ancestry, control too much land, money, and power; they have for generations. So does the US military. After a twenty-five-year absence, American military bases reopened, provoking visceral negative responses from those who believe that the US has, for too long, poisoned these islands with hazardous waste and toxic male misbehavior. But there are new colonial overlords now. “Globalization is the same as the old colonialism,” Mata says, “but it’s also not. So what is a union today? What must our trade union strategy be? We are figuring that out. We are learning.”
Asuncion Binos, who goes by the nickname Sion, has been thinking about that question since she began working in Manila garment shops in the 1970s. Conditions for Filipina garment workers have worsened since that time, she says, and opportunities have narrowed. A thin, tall woman with thick dark hair and a soft voice, Binos pulls up a chair in the Quezon City offices of the Alliance of Progressive Labor. She introduces herself as president of the United Voice and Strength of the Working Class, a garment workers’ union. She also works for the International Trade Union Confederation—ITUC. Organizing workers has been her life passion. She’s tired but not quite done.
Binos used to worry about how to unify fractious Philippine garment unions. Now she is thinking globally. She is touched when unions in Scandinavia and other affluent nations aid her financially strapped union. “They know they have to. We all do. Globalization. It is really my hope now that everyone working for the same labels in different countries can unite,” she says.
Instead of myriad small shop-floor unions, Binos wants Filipina garment workers in one big union. But the struggle is bigger than that. “Labor needs to be organizing together all around the world.” Her dream is that “eventually, we will be one, whether the workers are in the Philippines or Bangladesh. Those who produce clothing for the same company should work under one contract, maybe even for the same union. Then we can really help workers.”
It’s a twenty-first-century vision, but Binos says that her way of thinking has roots in the history of the Philippines as a global crossroads for trade. For five hundred years, the Port of Manila connected China with the Americas. The Spanish promoted trade between its colonies in Latin America and its crown jewel in Asia. Thinking globally only makes sense, Binos says. She would like to see her country once again a global nexus—this time not for profit or military might but for workers’ rights and international solidarity.
Like so many in her city, Sion Binos first came to Manila from the countryside as a young girl looking for a brighter future. Her brother took a truck-driving job to pay for her to finish high school. Then the whole family moved. Her father became a street sweeper. Her grandmother sold bread. Her mother started a weaving workshop in their home—baskets, plates, and hats woven of palm fronds.
Binos got to attend college, but she had to work at the same time. She found a job in a garment shop. There were many in Manila in the 1970s. The big clothing companies were first fleeing the United States, Europe, and Japan then, relocating their factories to cheaper lands. Asia became the export powerhouse of the rag trade. The number of garment jobs in the Philippines tripled. Most workers were young women like Binos. For twenty years, she sewed in shops that were “right around the corner from my house.”
Garment factories dotted Manila’s working-class neighborhoods in the 1970s. Women walked or bicycled to work. Soon after Binos began sewing clothes for a living, union organizers came to speak with her. Being in a union was the norm for Manila workers then, she says. “When we first entered the shop, we had an orientation to teach us about workers’ rights. The union was very present and happy to organize us. You could work in one shop for a long time, and make a living—not a lot but enough.”
Excited by what she was learning, Binos became a union officer before she was out of her teens. When she asked her parents for their blessing, her father said that she was old enough to make her own decision. “He didn’t know much about unions but he was willing to let me go my way. But my mother cried. She said, ‘No. Please. Please, no.’ She was frightened. And I understand why.”
By the late 1970s, dictator Ferdinand Marcos had backed off somewhat from brutal assaults on labor organizers. But the violence never really ended, not in his administration nor in those of Corazon Aquino, General Fidel Ramos, or the country’s twenty-first-century presidents, Gloria Macabal-Arroyo, Benigno Aquino, and Rodrigo Duterte. Thousands of Philippine labor activists and indigenous land rights activists have lost their lives.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the rationale for the killings was that the activists were linked to armed Communist insurgents. Later, the murdered were said to be members of Islamic terrorist groups. Both do exist in the Philippines, but the wars against them have too often provided a pretext for murdering innocent people with impunity. The US has done little to stop the killing. Often, in the name of fighting Communists, Islamists, or drugs, it has provided the weapons.
Since Marcos’s fall, the Philippines has been a dystopian democracy. There is a vigorous free press; there are labor and land rights laws, but too many union leaders, journalists, land rights activists, and the urban poor have paid the ultimate price for speaking out. Marcos killed an estimated three thousand people over his twenty-one-year reign. The most violent era was the early 1970s, after he declared martial law.
Then, in 1974, hoping to cultivate allies inside the labor movement and blunt the growing influence of Communist-affiliated unions, his Congress enacted a labor code that offered limited recognition of workers’ rights to unionize, strike, and bargain collectively. There was now a power base for trade unionists willing to work with the government. Unions were tolerated so long as they were not anti-capitalist or anti-government. They were especially well treated if their leaders agreed to report on dissident organizers.
In the 1980s, the grass roots were aflame. The May First Movement, KMU, organized workers to resist sale of Philippine lands and resources to foreign companies. KMU grew eight-fold to four hundred thousand in less than a decade, winning respect among the poor by criticizing local elites along with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and even the AFL-CIO, which it believed was cooperating with the Philippine military. (There is some evidence of this.)
Because of their purported ties to the Communist New People’s Army, KMU was a target of government repression. A hundred KMU leaders were imprisoned. Its chair, Rolando Olalia, was assassinated in 1987, one year into Corazon Aquino’s presidency. More than a million people lined the streets of Manila during his twelve-hour funeral march. They were mostly poor, clad in torn pants and rubber flip-flops, a world apart from the middle-class protesters in pressed jeans and yellow T-shirts who had propelled Aquino to power one year earlier.3
The stakes were high in the 1980s for those investing in the Philippines. Marcos had borrowed staggering amounts of money to keep his regime afloat, allegedly earmarked for infrastructure and economic development but mostly squirreled away in family accounts. His kleptocratic regime left the country hugely in debt—a crisis inherited by Aquino and Ramos.
They turned to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which responded in the same way they had in scores of the world’s poor countries during the 1980s and 1990s. They provided debt relief—but at a price. The Philippines would have to cut spending on public services and allow foreign corporations to purchase Philippine debt, land, and water rights. And a string of export-processing zones would be established—in Papanga, Batangas, Laguna, Cebu, and Cavite.4
Perhaps the most infamous was the Bataan Export Processing Zone (BEPZ) in Mariveles, on the tip of the Bataan Peninsula across the bay from Manila. It was there during World War II that American and Filipino soldiers began their infamous “death march.” A small fishing community remained there into the 1970s, trolling the rich waters of Manila Bay in dugout canoes. Then Asian Development Bank funds created a port for Japanese factory trawlers. They quickly depleted the fish supply.
In 1972, under the cover of martial law, Philippine soldiers bulldozed the homes of four thousand fishing families, forcing them to move twenty-seven miles inland. Fishermen were banned from crossing the zone to get to the bay. Without access to their fishing grounds, and with few people possessing enough land to plant, the cost of food in the area rose sharply.
Garment manufacturers flocked to the Bataan EPZ. By 1980, there were fifty-four global companies making clothing there. They employed twenty-six thousand women workers. Rents skyrocketed as people moved onto the peninsula. In 1975, there were twenty-five thousand people living near the zone. Two years later, there were forty-two thousand, either working in EPZ factories or providing services to those who did. Fishermen and farmers, too, lived in the shadow of the barbed wire.
A culture of resistance grew quickly among zone workers because conditions were so horrible, Binos says. In the city, close to their communities and to labor union offices, garment workers had full lives. They could eat and sleep at home; they had family and friends nearby. “In the zone,” they were cut off from their children, husbands, and parents. They slept two and three to a bed in dark workers’ dormitories.
The only food there was of poor quality and overpriced. They were forced to pay a premium for water as well. Lights were kept dim, causing eyestrain. Fabric dust filled the air, choking workers’ lungs. “It’s not really a life,” says Binos. “The workers are very depressed. They want a way out.”
In the twenty-first century, millions have moved overseas to get out of the zones. But in the 1980s, amid rising resistance to the Marcos regime, workers in the Bataan EPZ revolted. Low wages and unhealthy working conditions would soon become the norm in export zones around the world. But in that one place and time, fierce organizing mitigated the worst effects.
On January 4, 1982, twenty-six thousand Bataan EPZ garment workers launched the first general strike ever in a special export zone. Housed in dormitories inside the zone, the women were closely watched. Organizing had to be done in secret.
Marcos called in the military, insisting that it was illegal to strike in an EPZ. The soldiers turned powerful fire hoses on the women, beat them with truncheons, arrested hundreds. But they held out. And, remarkably, they won.
Workers fired for organizing were reinstated, wages were raised, and procedures were established to address sexual harassment in the factories. In an industry where most unions have just a few dozen or a few hundred members, the Bataan strikers proved that broad sector-wide organizing can work. That strike, says Binos, moved the country’s labor movement forward.5
In its aftermath, KMU called welgang bayan (people’s strikes) around the region. These welgang united workers with larger community groups. They shut factories, schools, and businesses, halted public transportation, and decried foreign corporations grabbing farmers’ lands and fishermen’s waters. In 1985, a people’s strike shut down a Westinghouse nuclear power plant in Bataan (built in an earthquake zone near an active volcano). Thousands of export-processing zone workers lay down in the roads to block trucks and military transports to the plant.
After the 1986 People Power revolution, Corazon Aquino at first seemed to welcome labor organizing. But repeated coup attempts, complaints by global corporations and by her own family, which owned large investments in sugar and other export crops, moved her to take a different tack. One year after Aquino took power, police opened fire on workers and farmers seeking an end to evictions and demanding the breakup of plantations and the return of expropriated lands to their rightful owners. Thirteen farmer-activists were killed. Thirty-nine more were wounded in what became known as the Mendiola massacre.6
For the next twenty years, Philippine presidents banned protests and memorials at the site. It was a time, Josua Mata says, “when we were all trying to figure out what to do with our new so-called freedom, and at the same time trying to figure out what freedoms we actually had.” Freedom was in flux in the Philippines, then and now.
The Aquino years saw the national Labor Code revised. It became harder to register unions and to legally strike. And Aquino’s regional wage boards negotiated worker pay outside Manila that was far lower than in the city. That made it attractive for foreign manufacturers (and local ones) to build plants and plantations, and to invest in export zones outside the city limits.
KMU fought back. The first Philippine rallies for “a living wage” took place in the late 1980s, culminating in a week-long national strike in 1989 involving five hundred thousand workers. This remarkable feat of organizing forced the government to grant the largest onetime wage increase in Philippine history. There was another general strike in 1990. Unions banded together across the political spectrum, demanding a nationwide wage increase. Labor power was at an all-time high in the country. Since 1990, Philippine wages have stagnated, as they have the world over.
Five years after the elation of their peaceful revolution, the country was in a pit of despair. Much of the suffering was a result of “structural adjustments” ordered by the global lenders who had bought up Philippine debt. “There’s not a sector in society that has not been kicked around by . . . paying a debt while the country groans under the rubble, taxing the poor . . . raising oil prices and freezing wages,” wrote newspaper columnist Conrado de Quiro in 1991.
“The peasants are eating their seeds. The workers have nothing to eat and are shot like dogs by murderous guards while on strike. . . . Public school teachers are . . . selling their bras to earn enough to eat. . . . It is an order dedicated to the International Monetary Fund, the foreign banks, the oil companies . . . thug-hiring employers, and land-reform-busting landlords.”7
Deep frustration drove thousands into armed insurgencies. Still, the idea of “protracted people’s warfare” did not appeal to everyone, says Josua Mata. The idea of picking up a gun, he still feels, “was attractive only to the young and stupid,” because any attempt at armed struggle would bring terrible retribution and “guns never bring anything positive.”
As a democratic socialist, Mata says he rejected violence and a rigid class analysis that saw only peasants and factory workers as potential revolutionaries. He sought to build a different kind of movement, one that included jeepney drivers, street vendors, hotel cleaners and fast-food workers, students and teachers, street kids and squatters.
In 1996, Mata, Binos, and others founded the Alliance of Progressive Labor. They believed that the changing economy required “a broader sense of what a union is. That’s when we started developing our ideals of social movement unionism,” he says. They set out to organize workers in the formal as well as the informal sectors, in the dwindling manufacturing sector and the growing service sector.
In 2013, they created SENTRO—a federation that links public and private sector unions, garment, automobile, metal, and service workers. SENTRO is global in its vision, committed to building ties with unions around the world. One hundred years after the Industrial Workers of the World called for “one big union,” SENTRO has revived the notion.
Sion Binos’s faith in the potential of global organizing grew ever more intense as more and more garment industry jobs were moved to export-processing zones. After 2005, she says, almost “all the garment shops in Metro Manila were transferred to Cavite, where the big export-processing zone had opened. My only choice was to organize inside the zone,” a labor environment ruled not by Philippine law but by global trade policies—and brutal force.
It’s nearly impossible to make a decent living sewing clothes in Cavite, says Binos. “The prices for food are the same as Manila, but the rents are higher and the wages are almost nothing.” Philippine garment factories are more likely than those of any other country to pay subminimum wage. “And jobs in the zone pay less than my old job in Manila,” says Binos, “but workers go there because there are no longer jobs in the city.”8
When I visited in 2015, there were twenty-seven garment factories in Cavite; others produced shoes and electronics. Of the workers, 85 to 90 percent were young women. Many had high school degrees; some even had a little college. “In today’s market, that doesn’t help them make a living,” Binos says. Many saw no future in the zone. They planned to join the millions who each year leave the Philippines to become domestic workers in Hong Kong, New York, London, or the Gulf states. “Workers are our country’s biggest export,” Binos says ruefully.
Usually they leave the country because they want better food and housing for their children. Binos has seen Cavite garment workers feed their babies Nestlé Milo ActivGo, a malted wheat and barley drink with 402 calories a cup and as much sugar as a glass of Coca-Cola. The Philippines is Nestlé’s second-largest Asia market. “You’re supposed to mix Milo with milk or water,” Binos says. Since workers in the zone often have neither, they “feed their children the powder with a spoon.” Families of five live on one package a day, she says, especially when they are waiting for their paychecks.
Hygiene is a challenge. “Each family shares one foil packet of shampoo,” says Binos, if they have water. A tiny rented room in the zone costs half of their monthly salary—before taxes. Most workers take home between $41 and $51 a month. The cost of living in the zone is lower than in the US but not by that much. Workers take loans from employers to make it till the next paycheck.
“So they fall deeper and deeper into debt every month because the companies charge high interest on the payday loans. It keeps them almost enslaved. They work till they have no more energy,” Binos says, sad and angry in a soft-spoken way.
In 2016, hourly compensation costs for Filipino garment workers were among the lowest in the world. And yet, Philippine government officials and factory owners warn Binos that factories will shut down and move to Bangladesh “if our workers earn too much money.” She lays her hands palms-up on the table. “I don’t believe it’s true. How can they earn less?”
Workers at a Cavite factory sewing for Ann Taylor and Ralph Lauren were earning $7 a day in 2015. That included a cost-of-living allowance and these were women who had been working there for a decade. The women all work overtime, says Binos, because the company offers them “an incentive. What is the incentive? If they finish their quota in two hours they will be paid for four. But if they do not finish in four hours, they must work for free until they are done.”
Binos exhales. “I tell the workers, ‘You exert all your energy to finish the quota. Then you have no energy for your families, no energy to talk to other workers.’ It is a six-day week. They work Saturday too. Workers leave the factory and all they can do is rest.”
She does not blame Cavite workers when they tell her they have neither time nor energy to come to union meetings. “The one day they have free,” Binos says, “they put into washing, ironing, family bonding. So when you ask, ‘Can we have a meeting?’ they say, ‘There’s just no time.’” Some have children who live with grandmothers in the city. On Sundays, they travel for six hours on open-air buses through gridlocked smoggy streets to see their children for a few hours.
After lunch on Sunday is the only time Binos can convene union meetings. “Women have to do laundry and errands in the morning. Those who can, arrive at two o’clock. They talk fast, then rush home because the following morning is another workday. Their husbands live in the city and drive tricycles [pedicabs]. That pays very little and offers no security, so the women feel like they have to stay in the garment shops even if they hate it—for their husbands, parents, kids.”
The threat of violence looms as large today as in Marcos’s time, Binos says. Under Duterte, maybe worse. She recalls a recent organizing drive. Enough women at one factory had signed union cards that the Labor Department ordered a recognition vote. The morning of the election, five uniformed men carrying automatic weapons stood at the factory gate. “In export zones they have their own special military,” Binos says, “but I hadn’t seen these men before. We were just two female organizers and two Department of Labor officials monitoring the election. ‘Why do you need five armed men?’ I asked them.”
Shortly before the vote, the guards aimed their guns at the president of the union, ordering her to stop handing out leaflets. They escorted her out. Binos followed and saw the guards lock her up in the guardhouse. “The workers saw and came to protest. So the guards let her go. But it was typical. They try to scare people. Every organizer who is giving out leaflets, they harass them. When I was young, anything that happened the workers would say, ‘Let’s go on strike.’ Now people are scared. It’s very difficult to organize now. Very different.”
Binos was amazed when the women voted to join the union. “They had to summon up nerve to raise their hands while a few feet from them there were men with machine guns. It takes a lot of courage to vote for a union under those circumstances.” I ask where her courage comes from. She answers: “That’s easy. My courage comes from workers organizing themselves, not giving all of their energy to the factory owners.” After five centuries of colonialism and seventy years of venal, brutal presidents, the Filipino people have no one they can trust but themselves.
Like every garment organizer I met across Asia, Binos spends a lot of time searching for labels. “I look for labels so I can figure out who the buyer is for each factory,” she says. “When we find a buyer who has workers in other countries, we make links between the workers.” Binos and other ITUC organizers strive to create standards for garment workers across Asia. She has traveled to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Hong Kong to forge regional bonds.
Like Kalpona Akter, Binos is determined to hold transnational companies accountable for the deaths she believes they have caused. When she started in garment work, it was safer, it paid all right, and you knew who your employer was. By the twenty-first century, Filipino workers seemed to be sliding backward fast.
On May 14, 2015, the Kentex flip-flop and sneaker factory exploded into flames, killing seventy-two and wounding hundreds. Factory doors were locked; fire extinguishers did not work. Windows were barred, preventing workers from escaping. Binos was among those called in to investigate. She found that two different fire inspections had concluded that the factory was unsafe. Still, city officials let it stay open. Investigators began to look for evidence of bribes.
The Department of Labor report, outpourings of grief by victims’ families, and angry workers’ protests convinced the Philippine government to indict Kentex executives and the officials who had ignored safety warnings. Kentex offered the same argument that owners of the Triangle factory had made a century earlier. There is no proof the doors were locked, they said. Workers had panicked. It was kind of their fault. When those arguments were debunked, Kentex took the tack that Walmart had after Tazreen. The dead were not Kentex employees, executives said. They worked for a subcontractor.
Fifty-seven victims’ families sued Kentex and the Philippine Department of Labor. Kentex offered to settle. Without resources to sustain a lengthy legal battle, the grieving families settled for less than $3,500 per victim. It was, said one grieving parent, an insult, salt in the wounds.9
Such outrages are possible because of contractualization, says Binos. Few Filipino garment workers are covered by national labor laws anymore. In one factory where she was organizing, Binos found that just two hundred of two thousand workers were official “employees.” Only they had a legal right to unionize. The other eighteen hundred were considered “temps.” On February 2, 2017, another fire ripped through a Cavite factory, this one injuring 120. They were protected neither by law nor by unions. Sion Binos is tired and angry.10
Still, she takes hope in the young organizers she has recruited, women in their twenties and thirties who are savvy and smart and full of new ideas. They communicate and organize via smartphones and social media. “They are inventing something new,” she says with hope. Even in the newest “cheapest” place to produce, Ethiopia, where there is not yet a minimum wage law, trade union organizers have won collective bargaining and 25 percent wage increases since 2014. The movement is truly global. Binos continues to believe.11
“But we still need the basics,” she says. Many workers she organizes are children of farmers who have lost their lands. She points to a poster on the walls of the SENTRO building. A woman with her mouth taped shut holds an empty bowl in outstretched hands: “No Rice Without Freedom. No Freedom Without Rice,” the poster says. “The right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike guarantees rice and freedom to all.” In the end, it all comes down to land, water, and food.