TENS of thousands of jobless working class could hardly feel the 122nd celebration of the country's Independence Day on Friday, June 12, 2020, a local labor leader said.
Wennie Sancho, secretary-general of General Alliance of Workers Associations (Gawa), said the significance of this celebration had escaped the minds of the displaced workers amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Sancho said independence is not merely an expression of desire but a means of providing the workers with a decent standard of living.
"The despair brought about by large-scale unemployment comes with the threat of destitution that life is unbearable when hunger and poverty are at our heels," he added.
The labor group said that to the famished worker, independence is nothing but a slogan.
"What can freedom mean to a laborer worn out by toil, whose children are fret and ail? Where is independence when various forms of human degradation continue to exist in the filthy slum areas? The poor are living in crumbling hovels serving as their makeshift shelters for the destitute and the downtrodden," Gawa asked.
It said most of the poor workers in the informal sector have to content themselves with a bare ramshackle hut for a dwelling place, their daily subsistence consisting of a measly staple of rice and dried fish which is often not enough.
Most of the displaced workers and their families go hungry eating less than three times a day. For them, independence is an alien word they could hardly understand, it added.
Sancho, also the labor representative to the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board (RTWPB) in Western Visayas, said independence includes equality and it would not be complete when there is a great gap in the standards of living between the rich and the poor.
He pointed out that it is the contrast between the economic abundance enjoyed by the chosen few and the burden of poverty imposed upon the poor majority.
"As a nation, we are not free when together, we are helpless to institute changes," Sancho said.
"When the course of the government, like a descending landslide, cannot be altered by any action, petition or protest, then we are not independent at all," he added.
The labor leader believes that Filipinos are only independent if they can openly question, criticize and oppose the dominant power structures.
"We are only independent if we shall not allow ourselves to be subjugated," he stressed.
For independence to be enjoyed, Sancho said the government should recognize human rights and the dignity of a worker. He added that human rights are violated when the basic economic rights of the worker, enough to ensure a life worthy of human dignity, are denied.
Independence calls for the establishment of a just and humane society that must free the workers from poverty, he added.