A specter is haunting the Arroyo regime, the specter of an angry working class!

Today, on the occasion of the103rd Labor Day celebration in the country, the government trembles in fear as tens of thousands of workers march on the streets of major cities around the country to once again reassert its identity and its strength.

Workers more than a century ago held momentous strikes, clashed with the state police and military protecting the interests of the capitalists, and sacrificed their lives to fight for their rights and freedoms and to assert their power against oppression and exploitation of capital.

After more than a hundred years later, the movement has come a long way in advancing the interests of the working class. However, it has yet to alter the inequitable social structures that have kept the majority of the workers poor and powerless.

Labor Day is thus the appropriate occasion for the working class, through its labor movement, to renew its commitment to social transformation.

And herein lies the paranoia of the Arroyo regime. After all, Mrs. Arroyo represents a system that continues to perpetrate a litany of crimes against the Filipino working class: joblessness amidst economic growth; falling real wages amidst rising productivity; denial of social services amidst increasing tax burdens and an epidemic of corruption scandals; intensification of political repression that threatens to equal the dismal record of the Marcos dictatorship; and its continued usurpation of power.

Unemployment is now of crisis proportions. Figures from the National Statistics Office revealed that close to 11 million workers or 30% of the 32 million strong labor force were looking for work in 2005. This number included over four million jobless Filipinos and seven million underemployed workers. Women were hit hardest as women workers in the 15-24 age bracket registered the highest unemployment. Only 700,000 jobs were generated in 2005, short of more than 900,000 people that join the labor force every year. Worse, the quality of jobs being generated leaves much to be desired as 87% of these jobs were part-time, 52% were unpaid family jobs and 77% were of low-productivity activities.

Meantime, real wages continue to slide down as the purchasing power of peso continue to decline from P0.79 in January 2005 to P0.74 in January of this year. No wonder all minimum wage earners live below the poverty threshold.

These are crimes against the working class. But the biggest crime is the government's continued adherence to a neo-liberal economic program prescribed by WTO and International Funding Institutions like IMF, WB, and ADB. Discredited as they are, government continued to implement wanton liberalization, deregulation and privatization as a panacea.

Rather than listen to the grievances of the workers, the Arroyo regime responded by intensifying political repression. Rather than wage a war on poverty and joblessness, it opted to launch a war against the labor movement and the entire progressive movement!

Bad as they are, the 'calibrated preemptive response' (CPR) and other atrocities committed under the auspices of PD 1017 are minor inconveniences compared to the series of brutal extra-judicial killings suffered by journalists a growing number of organizations fighting for the rights of the working people.

The Arroyo regime has failed to go after the perpetrators of these heinous crimes and bring them to justice. To add insult to injury, military officials implicated in these gruesome murders were even given recognitions and rewards. We hold this regime responsible for all these grave violations of human rights.

Truly, this government does not deserve the support of the working class.

It is for this reason that today the APL, together with its allied organizations, reiterates its call for the ouster of the Arroyo regime and the establishment of a transitional revolutionary government.

Today, it marches to dismiss the dubious charter change initiative of the Arroyo regime as a shameless maneuver to retain power while at the same time realign our Constitution to the requirements of neo-liberal globalization: the purging of all the nationalist provisions of our Constitution and the weakening of workers' civil and political rights.

It demands the development of full employment policies that would generate sustainable jobs, a living wage and solid guarantees for all workers' and trade union rights. But more importantly, it reaffirms its commitment to work for the transformation of the country's inequitable social structures.

Indeed, elites and its representatives in government have reason to tremble in fear. Soon, they would have to answer for all their crimes against the working class.

Mabuhay and uring manggagawa!
Mabuhay and kilusang unyon!