The workers will never acquiesce to US-Duterte regime’s plan to revert back to the slave-like conditions of 10-hour work day under the 4-day work week. The right to just labor hours is a victory that has been attained by the labor movement many centuries ago. Now, the US-Duterte regime wants to overturn this. His ineptitude is so harrowing for him to think that the solution to the oil crisis is to exacerbate the slave-like conditions of laborers.

Instead of decisively suspending the excise tax, resume regulation on the oil industry and increase the salaries of workers, the regime wants the laborers to shoulder the burden of the crisis brought about by Duterte’s puppetry. The workers will be made to suffer just so the regime can salvage itself. Will they not be the ones to be neck-deep in oppression as the days they can earn wages lessen while hours of their labor increase?
The greedy US-Duterte regime comes out with an endless variety of excuses to avoid increasing the workers’ salaries. According to Socioeconomic Secretary Kendrick Chua, the increase in wages will mean a one-point increase in inflation. But whatever statistic they choose to use, it is clear for the workers that adequate and living wages that the anti-poor regime divests them is part of their democratic rights.

Duterte’s refusal to resolve the workers’ basic needs and his nerve to deluge them with additional oppressive measures illustrate further how just the labor struggle is. Greater number of workers must unite in strengthening their struggle. They must show their force in resisting Duterte’s plan to formally commence the anti-people conditions of the 4-day work week. They must demand the end of contractualization, flexi-rates, compressed work week and other slave-like faces of oppression against their ranks. They must call for adequate and living wages. In Bikol, where the minimum wage ranks as the lowest among regions, it is all the more just for them to fight for substantial wage increase. They must defend the victories the democratic labor movement have already won in the past!

Most of all, the workers must join the revolution to completely break free from the tethers of slavery. Through this, the workers and the people will be able to defend their labor rights, not for the capitalists to gorge on anymore, but to serve the needs of the whole country. The workers and the people’s firm belief in the revolutionary armed struggle is what is needed to erase all types of oppression and to construct a new society to be built by the people. This is a society that is genuinely just, free and developed.