The five day strike at an electronics subcon in the Cavite EPZA, the
country’s biggest export zone, ended yesterday with the reinstatement of
workers earlier fired for union activities. Striking workers of Seung Yeun
Technology Industries Corp. (SYTIC) will go back to work next week, including
eighteen illegally terminated employees, in a deal reached at a mediation
meeting convened by the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). Two retrenched
workers earlier accepted the separation offer of management and are not covered
by the agreement.
“We will report for work with our heads held up and with our dignity as
workers recognized. We owe this victory to the determination of our union members
who paralyzed the operations of SYTIC for almost a week and forced management
to accede to our just demand for reinstatement. We hope this is the start of
management’s change of heart that it needs to give workers their due and respect
their rights,” stated Frederick Bayot, president of the SYTIC workers union.
The
striking SYTIC workers earlier threatened to escalate protests inside and
outside the Cavite EPZA if their demands were not met. More than a hundred members
of the partylist group Partido Manggagawa (PM) and the union Philippine
Airlines Employees Association (PALEA) occupied the DOLE office in Imus, Cavite
while the mediation meeting was ongoing yesterday. While Thursday night the
SYTIC strikers and their supporters marched around the export zone and hopped
from one factory to another to solicit support from EPZA workers.
Union officers and members were fired by SYTIC management in an attempt
to bust the union that was formed to address numerous workplace issues. SYTIC
workers complained of wages that partly are not paid in cash but in the form of
meals, illegal deduction on wages for company events, non-payment of overtime
due to an illegal compressed workweek schedule, and the lack of a company
nurse, doctor and hospital bed, as provided for in the Labor Code.
“We call on the DOLE to act on the complaint we earlier filed at the
provincial office about labor standards violations at SYTIC to ensure that they
are appropriately and promptly addressed,” Bayot insisted.
He added that “We also would not have won without the solidarity of
fellow workers in other EPZA factories and labor groups like PM, PALEA and
Sentro who extended moral and logistical support for our picketline. The
workers united will never be defeated.”
SYTIC manufactures plastic products that provide protection to
integrated circuits and electronic components from physical and electrostatic
discharge during storage and shipping. Its three biggest customers are ON
Semiconductor Philippines Inc. in Carmona, Cavite, Analog Devices General Trias
Inc. in the Gateway Business Park in General Trias, Cavite and Texas
Instruments factories in Baguio and Clark ecozones. All are local subsidiaries
of US multinational companies. ON Semiconductor is a spinoff of Motorola. SYTIC
also supplies to Cavite-based factories of local subsidiaries of US electronics
companies Maxim Integrated and Cypress. It exports part of its production to
C-Pak Cergas in Malaysia.
April 16, 2016
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