By Sentro Labor
(Editor’s note: This press release has been rewritten in the first-person perspective)
As we marked the 54th anniversary of martial law amid renewed demands for accountability and better governance, we at Sentro found ourselves asking a much deeper question: What does democracy actually mean to us Filipino workers?
For us, democracy cannot simply be measured by how governments are chosen. It must be measured by how power is exercised, how our public resources are governed and whether ordinary people like us have a meaningful voice in the decisions that shape our lives — in the government, in our workplaces and in the broader economy.
As our chairman, Abdulani P. Lakibul, often reminds us, our democracy cannot end with choosing who governs. It must mean an accountable government where workers have a genuine say. Otherwise, our democracy merely changes those who hold power without ever changing who actually wields it.
Every day, we see the glaring gap between democracy in form and democracy in substance. We live with the realities of political dynasties, corruption, impunity, poverty, severe inequality and patriarchy — a concentration of power that continues to deny our women equal voice, opportunities and economic independence.
Nowhere is this gap more stark than in our workplaces.
The Constitution promises us the rights to organize, bargain collectively and strike. Yet, rampant contractualization and insecure employment make these rights almost impossible to exercise. What good is our right to organize if a worker can simply be replaced before she even has the chance to form a union? What good is collective bargaining if we do not even have a stable employment relationship?
The truth is, the shadow of martial law still hangs heavily over our labor relations.
We are still governed by a Labor Code promulgated through Presidential Decree 442 in 1974, at the height of the dictatorship. While the regime ended and our democratic institutions were supposedly restored, the restrictive legal architecture of that era remains deeply embedded in our system. We are constantly forced to navigate a highly legalistic maze of procedural requirements, severe restrictions on strikes and picketing and the constant threat of the labor secretary assuming jurisdiction over our disputes by declaring our industries “indispensable to the national interest.”
Even our picket lines are restricted. We are told not to obstruct the “free ingress to or egress” from company premises. We are told we have the right to strike, but we are expected to do so without disrupting the employer’s operations — the very economic pressure that gives a strike its meaning. When our fundamental democratic rights are suffocated by so many legal restrictions that we can barely exercise them, we are left with the illusion of democracy. The shadow of martial law is no longer the soldier at the factory gate; it is the legal and institutional framework designed to constrain our collective power.
We firmly believe that political democracy cannot be separated from economic democracy. When wealth and economic power remain concentrated in the hands of a few, we workers have no say over the wealth we create, the conditions we endure, or the economic decisions that dictate our survival.
Democracy must reach the economy.
For us at Sentro, this means democratizing economic power. It means ensuring that working people have a decisive voice in the economy and that production serves human needs and the common good, rather than just the accumulation of private wealth. This is why we know there can be no genuine democracy without socialism — and no genuine socialism without democracy.
Fifty-four years after martial law, our task is not merely to preserve formal democratic institutions. Our task is to deepen democracy politically, economically and on the factory floor.
Democracy must reach our workplaces.
Democracy must reach our economy.
Democracy must belong to the workers.
