Historical roots and prospects of ending precarious employment in the Philippines

This article illustrates how major historical and political developments in the Philippines had separately and collectively contributed to the perpetuation of precarious employment and how the labor sector and the state responded and had been affected. These are, among others, the dominance of US imperialism, failure of land reform, fragmentation of the labor movement, rise of global value chains, aborted national industrialization, and hegemony of Anglo-American political and economic thought. The article also proposes that precarious employment be understood as a permutation of the Philippine state's de facto development program of brokering labor required by the political projects of global capitalism and neoliberalism, as can be attested by the history of Philippine labor laws and policies from the time of the Marcos dictatorship to the present. Meaningful change in this miserable situation would therefore not be attained by mere plugging of loopholes in policy as has been the response of government. More importantly, it would require an honest accounting of and antidote to the long-established systems of exploitation that underlie this crisis, which has become one of the most familiar facets of class conflict in recent Philippine history.