On September 19, President Bongbong Marcos issued Executive Order No. 97, which claims to protect workers’ rights to unionize, organize, and participate in “peaceful” concerted actions. The EO was supposedly a response to the 2023 ILO High-Level Tripartite Mission’s recommendations, particularly the creation of a body to safeguard these rights and hold violators accountable. But EO 97 is a distortion of those demands – an outright insult to workers seeking justice.
It is impossible to protect workers’ rights when the very agencies tasked with upholding them, such as the AFP, PNP, and NTF-ELCAC, are the same ones repeatedly violating them. These forces are responsible for the deaths of over a hundred unionists and workers under Duterte and Marcos Jr. Dozens of labor organizers remain imprisoned or missing due to military and police operations. The NTF-ELCAC has led relentless campaigns of red-tagging, forced disaffiliation, harassment, and door-to-door intimidation of unions across the country. These are not isolated incidents, but part of a bloody and well-documented history of repression and violence.
EO 97 further legitimizes the targeting of workers under the government’s “counter-insurgency” framework. Under the pretense of maintaining “industrial peace” and using a “whole-of-nation approach,” it opens the door for even deeper militarization of our unions and workplaces and greater interference by state security forces in union activities. This does not protect workers, it endangers them.
There is nothing to celebrate in EO 97. Workers must expose for what it is – fascism disguised as protection – and oppose it. No meaningful progress in labor rights can happen while NTF-ELCAC exists. It must be abolished, and its budget redirected to essential social services. Justice must also be served for victims of killings and violence. There can be no true labor rights without accountability.