ABSTRACT

A feature of Southeast Asian politics is the comparative weakness of organised labour. Activist trade unions are present in all but the most tightly controlled countries; however, they are fragmented, have very low worker-coverage and lack links to major political parties. This matters for studies of politics because labour’s capacity for disruptive collective action makes it a key social actor, and therefore a target of mobilisation or control by others. In Southeast Asia, organised labour is comparatively weak because economic and political elites have successfully contained labour’s collective activism as a part of broader projects to limit social representation and dissent. When and where alliances with other social classes and sectors have formed, they have contributed to political disruption and even regime change without strengthening labour significantly as a result. There are structural reasons for this: conditions associated with the timing and forms of capitalist industrialisation and globalisation have inhibited labour’s collective activism, leaving it relatively marginalised during important political and economic transformations (Deyo 2006). However, structural factors are not independent of political projects as often their impacts are amplified by the nature of the political spaces for legitimate labour organising. At one level, the political spaces for labour union organising are set by the laws and institu-

tions which govern industrial relations, since these formally establish the organising forms which are state-sanctioned. Collier and Collier (2002) argue that the initial shift from state repression of labour to state control by legal and institutional means constitutes a ‘critical juncture’ in the development of national polities. The shift need not be total for it to shape the course of statelabour relations thereafter, by institutionalising certain patterns of accommodation and conflict during the early phases of modern-state formation. In this regard, this chapter focuses on the Philippines, with some additional commentary on Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. However, notwithstanding the significance of the spaces for labour organising which are formally constituted, at no point is it argued that labour’s weakness in the Philippines is in fact reducible to these. There are three main reasons for this – each of which highlight the overriding impact of the nature of struggles for state power and recognition more broadly. First, for workers’ legal rights and protections to be effective, they depend on state enforce-

ment vis-à-vis employers. When enforcement is weak or absent, these formal rights and protections become sites of struggle and are constituted in fact as much by power balances involved as by the law itself (Woodiwiss 1998; Chang 2009). Second, state controls over labour are not limited to those which are specifically prescribed by industrial relations law, as for example

when mayors and provincial governors impose their own forms of control over workers and their organisations as a part of local development strategies to attract investment (Kelly 2001). Conversely, labour activism can also assume forms that are not prescribed within industrial law, as for example when NGOs and religious are involved directly in worker advocacy and organising (McKay 2006; Ford 2009). Third and finally, the political spaces for labour organising are also shaped by the ideologies of state-labour relations and the attendant social and political alliances and perceptions of the legitimacy of workers’ grievances and tactics. Because the Philippine labour movement is deeply divided on ideological grounds, within shared structural and legal constraints, the constituent federations operate very differently in relation to the state.1 Whereas the conservative federations tend to be incorporated politically via patronage and tripartite channels, others are more independent, with some of these belonging to leftist movements with radical change agendas. Thus, in so far as they impact directly on the power and legitimacy of the state, the political spaces for labour organising are at their most variable. The chapter begins with an account of the initial controls over labour organising in the

Philippines in the early decades of modern-state formation and independence, prior to the Pacific War. Thereafter, the chapter covers further major turning points in state-labour relations, against the background of broader political and socioeconomic continuities and transformations. There are sections on the Cold War, export-oriented industrialisation and authoritarian rule, democratisation and globalisation. Throughout we will see that nowhere in the region have there emerged the social democratic modes of accommodation that have featured in Europe. By the same token, nor do we see the kind of pluralist polities that liberal modernisation theorists predict will emerge with capitalist industrialisation.