Summary

Workers’ representation in decision making is considered as an important element in economic and social development. Its extension into the political sphere is based on the assumption that sectoral representation widens the democratic space, considered to be the better framework for establishing a regime of stable, peaceful, just, and progressive society.

Traditionally, unions are seen to be representing workers at the workplace and are generally responsible for improving and defending workers’ economic and social interests. Unions improve working and living conditions through the classical means of collective bargaining, mutual aid and legislation.

The classical means are intertwined. Through legal guarantees to the right to organize and free collective bargaining, workers through their unions attempt to achieve power parity with employers, serving as countervailing force to the natural dominance of employers as owners and managers of enterprises, Mutual aid complements, or supplements what workers can not get through, collective bargaining as also it serves to strengthen the unions’ representation roles by exercising solidarity within, between and among unions . Through legislation, workers’ rights are strengthened by legal guarantees and through which unions seek to advance their rights and interests at work and in the broader society as well.

This paper examines three types of workers’ representation in the Philippines:

(1) at the workplace through unionism and collective bargaining, labor-management cooperation or committee, and employee councils;

(2) in Tripartite (policy-making and implementing) Bodies 

(3) in Legislative Bodies through the party-list system; and

It argues that workers’ representation is generally weak, ineffective and inefficient, owing principally to

(1) the negative consequences of globalization on unionism,

(2) the legal and institutional barriers to workers’ representation in general and unionism in particular, and

(3) the inherent limitations, fragmentation, low density and dissipating strength of traditional unionism.

To remedy this situation, the paper vies for an expanded concept of unionism: a return to the social movement roots of unions, but expanded in coverage in order to adequately respond to current and emerging labor market realities, such as flexibilization, informalization, external migration. This is done by linking or incorporating all types of workers and their various modes of organizations into the trade union movement, both locally and globally. This expanded concept of unionism is referred to as social movement unionism or a trade union-social movement.