A guild for the online techie tribe labOREm ExERcEns

LABOREM EXERCENS

THE Philippine Labor Code is turning 45 this year. It was promulgated through a Presidential Decree (PD 442) by President Ferdinand Marcos on May 1, 1974. In the light of the numerous changes in the labor market and the composition of the labor force in the last five decades, the Code truly needs an updating, if not an overhaul. In the first place, the Code is virtually silent on the organizing rights and social protection needs of the various segments of the informal sector/economy workers, who constitute two-thirds of the labor force. A proposed Magna Carta for Workers in the Informal Economy (MCWIE) has been languishing in Congress.

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n the other hand, the formal sector labor force has also become diverse. In particular, the non-regulars composed mostly of casuals, temporaries, seasonals, project hires, agency-deployed workers, job-order employees (for the government) and other contractuals outnumber the regulars by a wide margin. Hence, the discourse in Philippine industrial relations is overwhelmingly focused on how to regularize the nonregulars, and strengthen the ranks of those who enjoy collective bargaining rights. a 2017 study of the Ilo Manila office estimates the total of those covered by registered collective bargaining agreements (CBas) to be around 200,000 in 2016, a measly number indeed considering that the total work force was around 43 million in the said year.

As it is, the country’s tripartite dialogue participants spend so much energy arguing over what is “permissible job contracting” and what is “prohibited labor-only contracting” under Articles 106-109 of the Labor Code. President Duterte made a promise to the organized labor groups that he would abolish the “endo system” within the first few months of his presidency. He failed to deliver and simply passed on the job to Congress, by asking the nation’s Representatives to come up with a Security of Tenure or SOT law that will pacify and satisfy the trade unions. At this stage, it is unlikely that such a bill shall be enacted by the present Congress.

Meanwhile, there are other segments of the labor force, some formal and some informal, who are invisible in the Labor Code. These include the techie workers in the fast-growing online economy.

The call center/business-process outsourcing sector, the second leg of the economy (the first leg is the overseas labor migration), has generated over a million jobs. There are no reports of any union being successfully organized in the sector despite the intense organizing efforts of virtually all the major labor centers such as the Kilusang Mayo Uno, Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, Federation of Free Workers, Alliance of Progressive Labor and National Trade Union Congress. Success here means the successful registration of a CBA that is duly recognized by both the employer and the Department of Labor and Employment. There are various reasons for the inability of the centers to form call center/BPO unions and conclude CBAs with the concerned IT/ICT firms. These include the following: workers are hired on a per project basis, IT/ICT workers do not consider themselves at the same level as the factory workers, strict human resource management programs that keep unionism at bay, and workers easily drop out of the company roll when they find work unpleasant.

Perhaps, it is time to widen the concept of unionism and collective bargaining that is applicable to various segments of the labor force, formal and informal.

In India, they have long recognized that informal sector workers cannot be organized into formal unions enjoying formal CBAs with their respective employers. Thus, today, the biggest unions in India are the informal sector associations such as the Self-Employed Women Association in Ahmedabad. They organize to defend themselves against state harassment of their businesses, mostly home-based work and street vending; they negotiate with the state governments on housing, education, social protection and various community needs; they pursue self-empowerment programs such as savings mobilization and developing their own banks; they set standards for their products, and so on and so forth. The proposed MCWIE law for the Philippine informals draws inspiration from the experiences of SEWA and other similar organizations in other countries.

The same type of unionism can be done in the case of the nonregular workers in the formal labor market. Why not organize the agency workers and let them take over the business of scalawag “manpower agencies” and the socalled manpower cooperatives? In Japan, there are reports of more and more agency and part-time workers being formed into unions, separate from the unions of the regulars.

Here in the Philippines, the usual pattern of organizing the non-regulars is to ask the government and the employers to regularize the nonregulars so that they can be covered by the CBA of the regulars. With the digitization of the economy and the continuous splintering of the labor force into various segments, this type of organizing will become more and more difficult.

It is in the light of the foregoing that we find the efforts of a group of online Filipino freelance workers to form a guild of their own a truly welcome development. These online freelance workers are composed mostly of media writers, Web designers, copy editors and data analysts. They are distinct from those employed by the call center/ BPO sector and those involved in the physical gig economy of companies like Grab and Lazada of the Alibaba group. These freelancers are largely on their own, meaning they negotiate with overseas clients, mostly wealthy individuals or small businesses, on specific jobs to be done, either at home or online. However, there are agencies that match their skills and talents with these overseas clients.

In America, the leading matching agency is Upwork, whose 2016 registry listed over 300,000 Filipino freelancers. Apart from media writers and editors, the list includes those doing accounting and consulting, IT and networking, and engineering and architecture. The biggest number of freelancers—over 100,000—are doing administrative support.

The latter means Filipino administrative assistants have become “virtual assistants” or VAs of rich clients overseas, doing various errands or jobs such as following up certain customers, doing record keeping, issuing reminders on important meetings and so on.

But what is a guild? Simply put, a guild is an association of like-minded individuals possessing similar skills and knowledge. The early unions in Europe were really guild of artisans and skilled workers. In the Philippines, during the late decades of Spanish rule and with the onset of capitalism, a number of gremious or guilds arose: guild of carpenters, guild of sandal makers, guild of tobacco workers, guild of port workers, and so on. In America, guilds of some professionals prospered and even became prosperous. These include the American Actors’ Guild, headed once upon a time by Ronald Reagan.

The primary purpose for the formation of a guild is to protect the members and support their individual and collective self-advancement. In the online freelance business, the challenges in these two areas are numerous and enormous, e.g., how to set fair standards on work and compensation, how to get redress for treatment by errant clients, how to get social insurance and other social protection, how to avoid a Race-to-the-Bottom competition among members and other online freelancers, how to get the government to recognize their status and get needed social and labor protection, and so on.

The point is that online freelancers are workers, and like other segments of the labor force, they deserve equal social and labor protection. (Note: The guild of online media freelancers is being formed with the assistance of UNI Apro and UP SOLAIR.)