Labor Union in the Philippines and Reliqious Participation in Work-Related Issues

For more than a century, the labor unions have succeeded in legitimizing the workers’ struggle and sacrifice in the Philippine society. In where unions sacrificed and struggled with the employer and government with respect to the benefits that they wanted to receive and some arrangements that they wanted to have in the workplace which every worker is enjoying up to now such as; sick leaves, maternity or paternity leaves, minimum working hours, overtime pay, right to organize, and many more. However, despite the fact that the labor unions struggled and sacrificed before, there are some failures in achieving a full economic and political empowerment of all workers in which the unions were weak and divided.

Currently, based on the recent Bureau of Labor Relations statistics under DOLE it showed, As of June 2013, a total of 16,638 unions were recorded existing at the enterprise level with reported members of more than 1.39 million workers. Union registrations increased by 1% from 16,466 last year. The bulk of the unions are in NCR it covers almost 60% of the total unions nationwide with 9,899 followed by Region IV-A with close to 13% or 2,119 unions. In terms of union memberships, NCR and Region IV-A also recorded with the most with 57% (793,685 members) and 13% (180,285) respectively. For public sector union registrations, a total of 1,765 unions existed nationwide, with 462,835 reported members. Registrations in the public sector unions increased by 2.5% compared to the 1,722 registrations recorded last year, also the volume of union members increases by 5.8% from 437,518 union members last year. NCR had the most number of public sector unions amongst regions covering 22% or 392, followed by Region VIII with 8% or 141 unions. Membership wise, almost 60% (275,616) of the total union members in the public sector were situated in NCR, followed by Region VI with 4.8% or 22,290 members.

The trend in unionization rate from 2004-2012, peaked in 2007 for the private...