THREE hundred ninety-seven workers of Tanduay in Cabuyao, Laguna, are now on strike. Many of them have labored for the Lucio Tan-owned company for close to a decade and they still receive below minimum wage remuneration without benefits as the liquor company continues to reap super profits year in and out.
In the past days, the picket line has been marred by violence as hired security personnel and thugs have attempted to break the strike leading to many injuries.
In the age of corporate social responsibility and so-called era of industrial peace, the Cabuyao strike is a significant reminder of the material conditions that bring about class warfare and its consequences, which cannot be contained.
There are many lessons that can be culled from this incident.
One is that Tanduay is dependent on the army of wage laborers in order to continue production and generate profit. Sure, they can hire new laborers in a market that is flooded with supply - that has always been the company's advantage. They, and other capitalist enterprises have milked this benefit to the hilt, hiring and firing contractual labor and pushing down wages to increase their bottom line. But there is a veritable tipping point to this state of affairs as the strike has proven.
At some point, the regime of low wages and contractualization will elicit a collective reaction from its victims. Together, they will realize that they have been receiving the bad end of the deal after working for the company for several years without chance of gaining tenure and increase in pay. Meanwhile, the company will bank on recruiting younger workers who are willing to suffer through these same terms only to be discarded when they start to demand for benefits and decent wages.
The declaration of a strike is a manifestation of a collective refusal to this imposed injustice. It is an insistence to a principle that the worker's arrived at through a deliberate process of personal discernment and collective debate. That they now find themselves locked in arms at the picket line with their fellow workers prove that they have risen above their personal circumstances and come to awareness about their shared fates.
For so long, the company has banked on their cowardice and their tendency to save their own skin instead of looking at their collective condition as a group. It has been a constant fight for renewal before the gods of management and they have seen others fall by the wayside of unemployment on the basis of flimsy justifications. They might save themselves today and continue to place food on the table of their respective families in the meantime. But there is no assurance of that tomorrow or the next day.
At the core of a strike's symbolic meaning is the display of an important social principle arrived at with great personal and familial sacrifice by the worker's themselves - no worker today or in the future should undergo such injustice.
When workers go on strike, these are the important convictions that are arrived at. There is the realization that their interests as a class are diametrically opposed to that of management and the company. They might win their case for higher wages and benefits but they have arrived at the painful conclusion, shaped by the oppression of generations of their kind, that a slave's wages, no matter how high, are still of slaves and private profit is accumulated from their labor.
We have seen glimpses of this emergent consciousness among the striking Tanduay workers. Ronald has been working for the company as a contractual laborer for the past four years. He declares that they are struggling for their regularization not just for themselves and their families but also for all the workers of the company being exploited by their unjust labor practices. This is not altogether different from the statement of Nanay Celia Veloso when she expressed her criticism of government because she wishes no family to go what they went through.
What these cases prove is that there is an easy solidarity arrived at among those who are oppressed by the system who bond together and find commonalities in their struggle. From these unities forged among the working and peasant classes, it becomes possible for them to declare "Everything for everyone and nothing for ourselves!"
It is this unique historical position of the poor to intimately know the injustice of the class system in the context of collective production for private profit that Marx considered the working class as the emancipatory force that would assume its historical role to end the class system. And this is also the reason why the middle class will always find it difficult to forge relevant solidarities among themselves and others because they are predisposed to save their own skin by compromising with the system.