Open Letter to Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo 

April 11, 2002

HER EXCELLENCY GLORIA MACAPAGAL-ARROYO
President
Republic of the Philippines

Dear Madam President,

I write, in behalf of the entire membership of the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL), to express our indignation against your recent decision to unilaterally transfer the legal holiday of Labor Day from 1 May to another date, this year to 29 April.

While we see no compelling reason to oppose the “holiday economics” that your administration is trying to implement, we however take exception to its application on May 1, the International Labor Day since 1886. Considering that the centennial celebration of the Philippine trade union movement will happen this year, we view this declaration as a contemptuous effort to undermine everything that the workers have struggled for the past 100 years.

A hundred years ago last February 2, amidst the massive repression imposed by the American invasion forces, the first trade union federation in the Philippines – Unión Obrera Democrática (UOD) – was formed by some 150 voting delegates, in the presence of an even larger number of non-delegates, from the printers’ unions and other workers’ organizations called gremios of barbers, cigar-makers, tobacco workers, clerks, carpenters, woodcutters, lithographers and other laborers. A few months later, UOD led a series of strikes in the different factories to press for higher wages and better working conditions. These militant actions snowballed into the first general strike on August of 1902. The UOD quickly grew from 33 to more than 150 unions. By 1903, the federation, then renamed as Unión Obrera Democrática de Filipinas (UODF), led a march of more than 100,000 workers in front of Malacañang to mark the first May Day rally in the country.

From then on, the trade union movement has always been at the forefront of the struggle not only for the defense and advancement of workers' rights and freedoms, but also for the well being of the entire country.

We already find it disturbing that your administration seems to give little importance to the significance of the Labor Centennial this year. Now you are even giving employers an excuse to prevent workers from continuing our traditional rallies to celebrate Labor Day on May 1!

We should not need remind you that more than a year ago, it was the same trade union movement, side-by-side with other democratic forces, that initiated the historic process that culminated with the toppling of a corrupt government and the constitutional succession of your administration. It was also the same movement that mobilized last year during May 1 to save the democratic space against the machinations of Erap and his cohorts. It is in this light that to many of our members, your declaration reveals the height of “bourgeois arrogance.”

In keeping with our tradition, we shall fully mobilize our membership on May 1 to celebrate the labor centennial and to focus the general public’s attention to the burning issues confronting the working people today. And we stand ready to assert our right to celebrate and to march in the streets as our comrades had done a century ago, long before May 1 became a legal holiday.

We therefore urge you to amend your Proclamation and include Labor Day, May 1, as the third exception to your “holiday economics” in order to continue to accord May 1 the importance that it deserves.

Very sincerely,

DANIEL L. EDRALIN
Chairperson

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