Members of the APL and dismissed trade unionists of the Dusit Hotel Nikko staged a picket here this morning to show their disappointment with the ILO and Unitar for holding an international confab in this upscale Makati City hotel, which is notorious for being a union buster.
These two specialized bodies of the United Nations, along with the Philippine and Swiss governments and the European Union, have chosen Dusit Hotel as the venue for the Regional Workshop on Chemical Hazard Communication and GHS Implementation in Asean, starting today until Oct. 20.
(ILO or the International Labor Organization is tasked "to promote social justice and… human and labor rights." Unitar or the UN Institute for Training and Research "aims to enhance the effectiveness of the UN through appropriate training and research." GHS is the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals.)
The protesters revealed that in January 2002 the hotel has hastily fired all the 29 officers and at least 61 members of the Dusit union after peacefully protesting management's arbitrary lockout and refusal to reopen their long deadlocked CBA. One hundred forty other union members were suspended from work. The case is now pending at the Supreme Court.
Internationally known, the Dusit case has been cited in the 2003 ICFTU Report as one of the top trade union rights violations in the Philippines, and was included in several global campaigns of the international labor movement, especially those led by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF).
The Dusit union is an affiliate of the National Union of Workers in Hotel, Restaurant and Allied Industries (Nuwhrain) as well as a member of both the APL and the IUF.
APL is the Alliance of Progressive Labor, a labor center of trade unions and other organizations of workers in the private, formal and informal sectors nationwide.
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