The Manila Port Strike of 1963 was among the largest, costliest, and most politically charged labor struggles in Philippine history and yet it and the new workers’ party, Lapiang Manggagawa (LM, Workers’ Party), to which its political fate was tied, disappeared from the historical record. Over a half century has passed and the LM has accumulated but a confused footnote here or there, while the strike itself has gone unmentioned.
It is a truism of history that it is written by the victors, but there is more at stake in the disappearance of the port strike than this. The oppressed and the vanquished possess their own mechanisms and organs of historical memory. In agrarian and premodern societies, oral traditions through a complex set of mnemonic devices sufficed to preserve this history. The complexities of modern political struggles, however, defy preservation within such traditions. Even more fundamentally, the urban working class is intensely mobile; when it has suffered a significant defeat it cannot return to the fixity of the land, but scatters in search of new employment. There is no stable community to sustain a complex oral tradition. The preservation of the history of the working class rests with the organs which it creates to carry out its struggle, including parties and unions. These organisations keep written records, publish their own papers, and however rudimentary and piecemeal these records may be, they constitute for the historian a tremendous historiographic advance beyond orality for preserving the narratives of the oppressed.
When the leadership of one these organs, however, for any of a variety of reasons, betrays the interests of its constituency, a motive emerges for the alteration, distortion, or erasure of the historical record. Often this runs up against other sections of the organisation which seek to preserve a rival narrative of events and out of the record of this dispute, however thin, the thrust of events can be reconstructed by the scholar. As this article will demonstrate, every section of the leadership of the organs of the working class in Manila, in a complex and rival fashion, betrayed the striking workers at the port. The event was buried and with it the party to which it was linked.
The labor unrest that gripped the Philippines in mid-1963, and found its sharpest expression in the port strike, was immense. The flow of goods in and out of the country was largely shut down for an extended period, and for a brief window, inter-island transit was shut down as well. Commerce ground to a standstill. The port strike involved 3,000 workers and lasted for 169 days. It was a bloody struggle that saw workers murdered on the picket line by both government troops and scabs, and yet other strikers die of malnutrition because they received no strike pay. By mid-August official estimates placed the business losses which had been incurred from the port strike at over a billion pesos, making it already the most expensive strike in the country's history, with more than a month to go.Footnote 1 Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez declared the strike a ‘national crisis because raw materials were being prevented from going to the nation's industries’.Footnote 2
On the basis of confidential US State Department memoranda, contemporary newspaper accounts, Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) publications, and material published by the LM, I reconstruct in this article the betrayed and deliberately forgotten port strike. The defeat of the strike and its erasure from the historical record was made possible, above all, by the leadership of the PKP, Jose Maria (‘Joma’) Sison and Ignacio Lacsina, who facilitated the suppression of the striking workers by the state. They provided the support of the LM to the government of Diosdado Macapagal as it violently cracked down on the picket lines at the pier, and they subsequently wrote the strike out of existence. At the head of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), Sison has exercised greater influence on the writing of the history of the struggles of the oppressed masses in the Philippines than any other figure, but he has maintained a studied silence about the events of 1963.Footnote 3
The speed with which the memory of the events which shook Manila in 1963 was eradicated from social consciousness is indicated by a CPP document from the early 1970s. The document asked the unions tied to the party to imagine the political implications of a strike which broke out at the port—‘the economy would certainly be brought to its knees’—but it made no mention of the fact that precisely such a struggle had erupted eight years earlier and that the founder of the party had supported its suppression.Footnote 4 No one in the comparatively youthful organisation, it seems, knew the truth. Not only the strike, but the Lapiang Manggagawa (LM) which stood at the centre of events, and was perhaps the largest independent organisation of workers in Philippine history, disappeared almost entirely from the historical record.
Ignacio Lacsina and union disunity
By the late 1950s, postwar political and economic life in the Philippines had achieved a certain equilibrium. Rival families, controlling a vast range of powerful economic interests, had established a mutually agreeable mode of political existence, which was organised into two parties—the Liberal Party (LP) and the Nacionalista Party (NP). The spectacle of elections, the horse trading of the primaries, and the party alliances constantly forming and breaking apart—all these combined to provide stability and continuity to the oligarchic politics of the country. The spume of alternating dynastic alliances washed over the archipelago with the regularity of the tides.
The rottenness of trade union politics in the Philippines, manifested in the events of the port strike, stemmed from its integral role in this process. Each union functioned above all as a vehicle for the personal political ambitions of its leadership, most often lawyers, who repeatedly engaged in the negotiation of alliances with representatives of the LP or the NP. The chaos of trade union politics in the Philippines was a direct expression of the fundamental instability of the dynastic alignments of the traditional political elite. As the senators and congressmen, LP and NP alike, altered their allegiances, jumped ship, changed parties, and played out the mutually agreed upon game of betrayal and duplicity, the union leadership followed suit. Just as the Liberal of today would be the Nacionalista of tomorrow and again the Liberal of two years hence, so too the umbrella organisations of labor allied and broke apart with the frequency of the national elections.
Workers in the Philippines had been hit hard by soaring inflation in the wake of Macapagal's decontrol of the peso in early 1962. The rising price of basic necessities, combined with stagnant wages, compelled the working class toward open conflict and the Lapiang Manggagawa was formed at a crucial juncture in the development of the class struggle within the country. In 1960, out of an estimated total labor force of 9 million, 0.5 million were unemployed and 1.5 million were underemployed; 65 per cent of this labor force was employed in agricultural labor. By 1962, 800,000 were unemployed and 2 million underemployed.Footnote 5 There were a total of 56 strikes in the first eight months of 1963, involving 32,011 workers. This was a growth in the number of workers on strike of 32 per cent over the previous year.Footnote 6
The interests of this class and its emerging struggles could find no expression in either of the two established parties. What was completely absent from the Philippine political landscape was a Labor Party, an independent party of workers. This was to have been the role of the Lapiang Manggagawa, but within months of its formal founding it had been merged with the ruling Liberal Party and its independence ended. As a direct result of this merger it fragmented in two years and effectively ceased to exist; by the end of the decade it had disappeared almost entirely from the historical record.
At the centre of these events was the reborn PKP. The state's suppression of the Huk rebellion in the early 1950s had sent the party into hiding, but under the impetus of political developments in the early stages of the Macapagal administration and with the organisational assistance of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Indonesian Communist Party), the party re-established itself as a political force in late 1962.Footnote 7 Within weeks it was playing the dominant role in Lapiang Manggagawa.
The party had been founded on, and remained committed to, the programme of Stalinism, which expressed the interests of privileged layers of the bureaucracy in Moscow with its core nationalist perspective of building socialism within the boundaries of a single country. Seeking to establish trade and diplomatic relations with various capitalist powers, the Stalinist bureaucracies used the political influence of communist parties in countries around the globe. They rehabilitated the old Menshevik conception of a two-stage revolution, which argued that a socialist revolution was not the political task of the day in countries of belated capitalist development, such as the Philippines, where it was necessary first to carry out a national-democratic revolution. Given that the tasks posed by this initial revolution were capitalist and not socialist in character, there would be a section of the capitalist class which would play a progressive role in it—the ‘national bourgeoisie’. A fundamental task for the working class and peasantry was thus to locate this progressive section and to ally with it and support it in the achievement of national democracy. While it held up the banner of Marxism and dressed itself in the garb of October 1917, this programme served the interests not of workers, but of a section of native capitalists and of the bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing.Footnote 8 The merger of the LM with the ruling party of President Macapagal as he ordered the violent suppression of the port strike was a direct expression of Stalinism.
Two individuals, Sison and Lacsina, effected the party's leadership of the LM, carried out the merger, and promoted Macapagal for carrying out the ‘unfinished revolution’. Sison, a graduate student at the University of the Philippines, returned to the country in 1962 from a six-month stay in Indonesia, where he had worked closely and trained with the highest levels of the immensely influential PKI.Footnote 9 As the eventual founder in 1969 of a rival Communist Party, the CPP, Sison would play a critical role in the politics of the country for the next half century.Footnote 10 His role in the LM and its support for Macapagal has never been previously documented, but his subsequent political life has been written on extensively. An account of the political origins and activity of Lacsina, on the other hand, has not yet been written.
Ignacio Lacsina was a lawyer who rapidly rose to prominence in trade union politics in the 1950s while in close communication with the US Embassy.Footnote 11 He was the vice president of Johnny Tan's Federation of Free Workers (FFW) from 1951 to 1954, and in 1953 he received a grant from the International Cooperation Agency, forerunner of the Agency for International Development, to travel to the United States and spent nearly a year touring the country.Footnote 12 On his return, Lacsina led his union of bank and insurance workers to break from the FFW, transforming the union into the independent National Association of Trade Unions (NATU), which would serve as his political base over the next two decades.
In 1956, Irving Brown, head of American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) international relations and a CIA agent responsible for its international labor operations, nominated Lacsina to serve on the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) consultative committee on forced labor practices in China.Footnote 13 The results of the committee's investigation, condemning Beijing, were published widely in the Western media, and Lacsina issued a public appeal to defend ‘fundamental human rights’ from ‘totalitarian forces’, singling out the ‘concentrationary regime existing in the People's Republic of China’.Footnote 14
It thus came as something of a surprise when less than three years later, Lacsina announced that he was a ‘socialist’ and that he intended to visit China and the Soviet Union, making the somewhat preposterous claim that he intended to spend four months driving across the countries in a Volkswagen Beetle.Footnote 15 He never carried out this plan, but having publicly established his reputation as a ‘socialist’, he busied himself with the creation of the Katipunan ng Manggagawang Pilipino (KMP, Union of Filipino Workers).
Jorma Kaukonen, labor attaché of the US Embassy in Manila, saw the formation of the KMP as an attempt at ‘making the Philippine trade union movement into a labor party, into a political movement’.Footnote 16 Lacsina was made secretary-general of the new party, and Roberto Oca, the head of the port workers’ union, the Philippine Transportation and General Workers Organization (PTGWO), was made president. US ambassador Chip Bohlen added to Kaukonen's assessment in a confidential memo to the US secretary of state, claimed that there was a left-wing segment of the KMP, which the embassy began referring to as the ‘Lacsina group’, that was ‘anxious to turn the Philippine labor movement into a “socialist” party, and to channel its energies into nationalist and generally anti-American directions. Oca, an extremely ambitious labor leader, needed the support of this left-wing and, although not a communist or a socialist, made a number of adjustments in the direction of “socialism” in order to get it’.Footnote 17 Events were to bear out this assessment.
In a move calculated to undermine the KMP before it could gather strength, the Philippine government abruptly convicted Felixberto Olalia and Pedro Castro—both long tied to the PKP—on a decade-old charge of rebellion in June 1959. The Philippine Trade Union Council (PTUC) and a number of other unions seized upon the conviction to demand that Oca and Lacsina expel Olalia and Castro from the KMP leadership, and when they refused to do so, many of the member unions pulled out of the new organisation.Footnote 18 By late July the KMP's strength had been dramatically reduced.
Toward the Lapiang Manggagawa
The majority of labor leaders, among them Lacsina, had been deeply invested in the 1961 Garcia campaign; the US Embassy in Manila wrote that ‘with but one or two exceptions, all national labor leaders supported former President Garcia’.Footnote 19 Garcia's loss to his vice president, Diosdado Macapagal, stood as evidence to them of the need for more effective control over their mass base; looking to wield greater political clout, the heads of nearly all of the leading unions began to negotiate the building of a Labor Party, to replace and move beyond the dead KMP, which would eventually take the name Lapiang Manggagawa (LM). By mid-1963, the LM, under the leadership of Lacsina and Sison, would become a decisive factor in national political life.
On 26 January 1962 at the Philippine Columbian Club ‘[m]ore than 20 representatives of rival labor unions … decided to bury the hatchet … It was initiated by Felixberto Olalia … and the late Pedro Castro … after the last November polls which in their opinion clearly dramatized the workers political disunity’.Footnote 20 While the PKP had continued a shadowy, fragmentary existence up to this period, when Olalia and Castro, both leading members, summoned the gathering of January 1962, it took its first cautious steps back into public life; by the end of the year the party had reconstituted its leadership for active political work.Footnote 21
Several days later an organisational committee meeting was held, ‘which was not publicized in the press’, in which it was decided that the workers’ party would be led by an ‘executive committee consisting of the president, three vice presidents representing major regions of the Philippines, and a secretary-general in whose hands the real party power rests’. The party would be financed by ‘levying P2.00 per annum dues on 150,000 members of unions … mainly in the KMP’.Footnote 22 Lacsina urged that the party should be named the ‘Democratic Socialist Party’, but Olalia ‘argued against the use of the word “socialist” stating that the political climate in the Philippines at the present time was such that any organisation bearing the name “socialist” would be an immediate target for reactionary attack’. By 23 March 1962 the organisation had formed under the name Lapiang Manggagawa, having agreed with Olalia's opposition to the inclusion of the word ‘socialist’. They announced that they would hold a national convention on 1 May.Footnote 23 By the beginning of April the LM leadership had drafted the new party's constitution, which was to be submitted for formal acceptance at a meeting on 30 April. A mass rally was slated to be held the next day at Bonifacio Monument and Lacsina was selected to present the LM Manifesto to the public. May Day arrived, however, and the LM leadership announced—without any explanation—that they were delaying their inaugural event.Footnote 24
The Lopez family and their influential paper, the Chronicle, had ‘backed Garcia to the hilt’ in the 1961 election.Footnote 25 Having taken office, Macapagal found himself thwarted at every turn by the powerful sugar bloc. Macapagal was deeply concerned that the emerging workers’ party would ally with his rivals, and with Eugenio and Fernando Lopez in particular, and thus at first he sought to thwart LM's formation. Secretary of Labor Romualdez privately informed the new US labor attaché, Norman F. Johnson, that he opposed the formation of a labor party as it made it more difficult to negotiate with workers. Just as rebellion charges had been brought against Castro and Olalia in June 1959, stunting the KMP's growth, the ‘[e]fforts … by Cid, Lacsina, Lerum, Oca, and others to organize a labor party were abandoned in mid-June when one of the organizers, Baltazar Cuyugan, was arrested as a leader of the Communist Hukbalahap military organization’.Footnote 26
It was at this point, in June 1962, that Joma Sison returned from Indonesia. Lacsina provided Sison with a job and stipend at NATU, as officer-in-charge of research and education. Over the next six months the PKP prepared to re-enter political life. In December at the instigation of Bakri Ilyas, a PKI member in the Philippines who had facilitated Sison's travel abroad, the PKP gathered forces. Jesus Lava, party general secretary, long in hiding, authorised the formation of a five-person executive committee.Footnote 27 The most active members of the executive, and the core of the reborn party, were Sison and Lacsina. The executive committee, closely tied to the PKI, set itself the task of pressuring Macapagal to support Sukarno in his campaign against the formation of the Federation of Malaysia. They sought to form an alliance with Macapagal around the creation of Maphilindo, which the PKP saw as a vehicle to further the unity between Sukarno and Macapagal in opposition to Malaysia. Ties with Jakarta it was reasoned, would distance Manila from Washington and would place it within the camp of Newly Emerging Forces, increasing the possibility of friendly relations with the socialist bloc. Within six months, the PKP leadership had merged the newly formed Lapiang Manggagawa with Macapagal's Liberal Party, as he successfully concluded the Manila summit with Sukarno and Tunku Abdul Rahman, and announced the formation of Maphilindo.
Having prevented the LM from launching in mid-1962 on the grounds that it was hostile to his interests, Macapagal began to woo its leadership, looking to see if the heads of its member unions could be swayed from their allegiance to the sugar bloc. On 16 August, Macapagal held a dinner and private discussion with 20 of the ‘principal union leaders’, which was followed by a meeting of the LM leadership with acting finance secretary Rodrigo Perez on 22 August. During this meeting they agreed to establish a labor consultation committee for subsequent meetings with the President.Footnote 28 On 11 September, Secretary of Labor Romualdez announced that he supported the move to form a labor party. Undersecretary of Labor Bernardino Abes, speaking to the press on 17 September, warned union leaders against allowing the LM to be used for ‘ulterior motives by “vested” interests’, ‘vested interests’ referring to the sugar bloc, and the Lopez brothers in particular. Abes added, however, that the LM could enter into an alignment with ‘another political party’—clearly meaning the Liberal Party—to ‘improve the workers’ conditions’.Footnote 29 It was this struggle over the future alignment of the LM, in which the PKP pushed the organisation into a merger with the Liberal Party, that precipitated the most explosive labor battle in Philippine history: the 1963 port strike under the leadership of Roberto Oca.
Oca, head of the PTGWO, was a key ally of the Lopez brothers. For Macapagal, a successful alliance between his administration and the LM required the removal of Oca.Footnote 30
Oca was born on 2 June 1919, the son of a ship captain. In 1941 he completed a bachelor's degree in Commerce at Far Eastern University, and in 1946 he entered the leadership of the Union de Obreros y Estivadores de Filipinas, the stevedore union at Manila's South Harbor. In 1950, he shifted to the Associated Workers Union, which organised the longshoremen, known as arrastre workers, and was elected president of the union in 1951. He broke the union's ties to the FFW and established his own labor federation, the Philippine Transportation Workers Organization (PTWO). Oca transformed employment at the piers, eliminating the outmoded system of labor gangs, a change which modernised work on the waterfront and turned Oca and the PTWO into the port's exclusive labor broker.
Oca built a close relationship with the Manila Port Service (MPS), the government-run corporation operating the South Harbor arrastre service, and the PTWO began to receive annual dividends from the profits of the MPS.Footnote 31 In 1959, Oca renamed the federation the PTGWO.
By the early 1960s, Oca's brother, Gregorio Oca, had been made an MPS manager, consolidating Oca's relations with the port. Roberto Oca profited handsomely off these ties and became quite wealthy. In 1954 he began taking annual trips to the United States, occasionally visiting Europe as well. Oca used his profits to purchase the Nautilus nightclub on the border of Manila and Pasay. Thus, by the beginning of the 1960s, after a decade of serving as the broker of unionised labor to the port, Oca was a rich and powerful man, operating both a nightclub and a casino and running a protection racket on the side.Footnote 32
His ambitions did not stop there, and in exchange for his support, Oca had been promised the position of labor secretary under a re-elected Garcia administration.Footnote 33 US Labor Attaché Johnson wrote in November 1962 that ‘President Macapagal made clear from the beginning of his administration that he would seek to displace Robert Oca as head of the dock workers in Manila's international shipping port, South Harbor.’ Johnson cited Oca's ‘political opposition to Macapagal's election and administration’ as having ‘produced a presidential aversion to Oca's continued labor leadership’.Footnote 34
Long-time Manila Mayor Arsenio Lacson died unexpectedly on 15 April 1962, and his death turned the 1963 midterm election into a deadly struggle for control of the city. The Manila mayoralty was the most fiercely contested prize on the ballot. In Manila, much more than in the countryside, the NP and LP needed to secure the labor vote and the LM emerged as the political broker of this vote. In October 1962, LM announced that Oca would be standing as the party's candidate for mayor of Manila in the November 1963 elections.Footnote 35 For Macapagal, in order to enter into an alliance with the LM, it was necessary that he break the power of Oca. To do this he intended to privatise the arrastre service, first transferring control over the MPS contract to the Bureau of Customs, and then selling the operation of the arrastre service to the highest bidder, declaring that the buyer would not be obligated to honour any existing labor contracts. The PTGWO was in the midst of negotiating a contract with the MPS to last through 1966; Macapagal planned to use the privatisation of the port to terminate this contract and thus Oca's political influence.
Opening salvo at South Harbor
Open hostilities commenced on 1 October 1962. The PTGWO staged a series of brief strikes at South Harbor as part of its contract negotiations with the MPS. The first strike successfully concluded within three days and the workers won a pay increase ranging from one peso to P4.50 per day.Footnote 36 The PTGWO staged a second strike on 9 November, this time to ensure that a cost of living adjustment (COLA) was included in the contract. Labor Secretary Romualdez ordered Manila-bound cargo ships diverted to other ports to avoid the striking workers, but in a show of solidarity, workers in Cebu refused to handle the diverted cargo. Romualdez threatened to send troops to break up the strike at 7 pm on 10 November. Acting on Macapagal's orders, Romualdez was seeking to use the November strike as the pretext to break the union and to displace Oca and the PTGWO from the port. Paulino Cases, head of Manila Railroad Co., MPS’ parent organisation, granted the COLA at the last moment, however. At 9 pm, as troops were being deployed to the harbour, the PTGWO and the MPS reached a deal which granted a P30 monthly COLA to the workers.Footnote 37 On 19 November, the PTGWO again went on strike to secure a guarantee that their contract would be retained during privatisation. Oca filed an appeal before the Court of Industrial Relations (CIR) demanding that the contract be honoured by the new private operator of the arrastre service and the next day the CIR handed down a ruling that the existing labor contract was a component of the port services for which private corporations were bidding.Footnote 38
This was a serious defeat for Macapagal, and in response he changed tactics, announcing that the recently concluded contract was invalid and any strike staged by the PTGWO was illegal, as the union, he claimed, did not have collective bargaining rights at the arrastre service. Only some government employees were legally entitled to collective bargaining rights. According to the Philippine Labor Code, if the workers were employed in a department with a ‘strictly governmental function’ then they had the right to organise but not to collectively bargain, but if the government enterprise in which they were employed was deemed proprietary, that is, business operations for which fees were collected, such as sewage and water services, then workers had the right to collectively bargain.Footnote 39 The Macapagal administration claimed that the arrastre service was strictly a governmental and not a proprietary function, and thus the workers’ picketing and collective bargaining was illegal.
The next several days saw a complex flurry of events. Labor Secretary Romualdez refused to allow the PTGWO to return to work and announced that he was terminating the MPS contract with the union. Responding to Romualdez, Oca threatened to launch a general strike of all members of the recently organised LM on 29 November if the contract were terminated, which would have been the first general strike in the country's history.Footnote 40 In the early morning of 28 November, Finance Secretary Perez intervened, signing an agreement for Oca's men to return to work under the terms of the recently agreed upon contract. Oca, however, disputed that the contract was being honoured, and claimed that wages had secretly been cut.Footnote 41 Later that morning, 68 government agents, on orders from Macapagal, raided Oca's offices, seizing union records and charging Oca with fraud and with violating labor laws. The next day, Macapagal delivered a nationwide radio address denouncing Oca.Footnote 42 Oca again threatened a nationwide strike, but his announced deadline had already passed and this second threat came across as mere bluster. In an attempt to get workers back on the job, Finance Secretary Perez and Congressman Vicente Ocampo negotiated a new six-point agreement.
On 30 November, while Oca was meeting with Perez and Ocampo, Romualdez ordered boats belonging to the Philippine Navy to bring in 500 scabs from Cavite to operate the port, effectively circumventing the PTGWO picket line.Footnote 43 The scabs who were to be employed by the government all belonged to the FFW. Johnny Tan routinely employed his union as a scab labor contractor, and he arrived at the South Harbor at their head. The deal with Oca, however, was concluded on the same day, and the scabs never actually set to work. Romualdez offered to pay Tan's men for standing rather than for working, but Tan stated that they had been promised long-term employment—replacing the PTGWO—and refused to accept the day's pay. He and his men, with pistols drawn, marched out through the picket lines. Violence was ‘narrowly averted’.Footnote 44 Tan threatened Customs that his 500 scabs would go on strike and picket the harbour themselves, because they had not been employed as promised and the PTGWO had been restored to their jobs.
Oca filed two cases before the CIR. The first was an unfair labor practices case, which called on the court to compel private bidders to honour the labor contract concluded with the MPS and the second argued that the functions performed by the arrastre service were proprietary and not governmental. The CIR refused to hear the first case until the second case was resolved. If the court ruled that the arrastre service was a governmental function and that the PTGWO therefore did not have collective bargaining rights, the first case would be moot and the contract invalid. Tensions on the harbour temporarily subsided while everyone waited for the court's decision, but the likelihood of a violent confrontation on the waterfront was in the background of the formal launching of the Lapiang Manggagawa.
The founding of the Lapiang Manggagawa
On 3 February 1963 the Lapiang Manggagawa was formally launched, assembling a significant majority of the trade union federations in the country into an independent political party.Footnote 45 One thousand and sixty delegates attended the founding convention, and elected Cipriano Cid president of the LM and Lacsina general secretary, the most powerful position within the party.Footnote 46 Roberto Oca and Jose Hernandez were elected as vice-presidents; and Joma Sison was elected as vice president for propaganda.Footnote 47 Sison's office meant that the LM's political issuances and statements came from his pen, and he later described his function as ‘organizing the research and education department, conducting seminars and coming out with news and press releases’.Footnote 48 With Lacsina at the head of the LM and Sison responsible for its public statements and printed material, the executive committee of the PKP exercised effective control over the new labor party.
The leadership of the Lapiang Manggagawa produced a five-page political programme, the ideological foundation of this workers’ party, opening with the declaration that the ‘alienation [of the Filipino worker] from the center of [political] power lies at the root of their present predicament—a predicament which is, by and large, still characterized by widespread want, squalor, disease, ignorance, and exploitation’.Footnote 49 They reassured their membership that ‘the abolition of this sub-human condition is the paramount concern of government’, and in order to assist the government in this matter, the party sought ‘to provide an effective instrument for reform political action for every Filipino worker who desires to participate in the dialogue of power’.Footnote 50 The LM's political weight would enable workers, the leadership claimed, to press for reforms and to secure a remedy to squalor and exploitation. Yet even in this founding document, as the political leadership elbowed its way into the ‘dialogue of power’, cleared its throat and spoke, it was not with the voice of the workers. Their language was that of nationalism and their interests those of the bosses:
We believe in the inviolability of the national will and in the primacy of the Filipino in his own country … We shall, therefore, work for the adoption and enforcement of policies and measures designed to decolonize the economy by shifting control and direction of our economic life from alien to Filipino hands. Filipino businessmen and industrialists shall be guaranteed protection against foreign domination.Footnote 51
The programme continued, ‘Major emphasis … shall be placed upon basic industrialization. Industrialization is the key to the economy of plenty.’ This industrialisation in the hands of Filipino capitalists should be funded by ‘native resources’, but ‘[f]oreign aid, in the form of long term loans on reasonable terms, and without strings attached shall be sought for’.Footnote 52
Protectionism, state support for native business interests, and the forcible transfer of ownership from ‘alien’ to Filipino capitalists—these were the planks of the programme of the Workers’ Party. There was no mention of a minimum wage, of collective bargaining rights, of job safety, reduced hours, benefits, retirement, affordable health care or housing; nothing in fact which touched upon the squalor and exploitation of the working class. Only one item in the programme directly targeted workers in any way and this was the chauvinist demand for the Filipinisation of labor, that is, for jobs to be taken away from Chinese immigrants.Footnote 53 The programme blandly claimed that these pro-business policies would make ‘the benefits of nationalism permeate down to the masses’, something which would be effected by combining ‘a predominantly native private enterprise with the necessary measures to correct existing economic disparities’.Footnote 54
The leadership continued its ‘dialogue’, declaring that the ‘gap between the few who are rich and the many who are poor’ had become ‘perilous’.Footnote 55 For the workers organised in this new party, the gap between the rich and the poor could be accurately termed ‘exploitative’ as well as ‘indicative of the irrational character of capitalism’, but this was not how the LM leadership saw the state of affairs. The adjective exposed their alignment. Stark social inequality raises the spectre of revolution; it is perilous precisely from the vantage point of the ruling class, for it is their interests which are imperiled.
Succinctly, the LM called for a programme of capitalist industrialisation under private Filipino ownership, funded and protected by the state, with additional support secured through foreign loans. This programme, they claimed, would secure ‘the fullest measure of social justice and nationalist protection to all Filipinos’.Footnote 56 The LM programme sought to bring the trade unions into mainstream politics. It was entirely oriented to the interests of the capitalist class and it attempted to palm off this orientation by assuring workers that the benefits of national capitalism would trickle down to them.
The entire LM leadership was bent on using their newly established organisation to curry favour with the ruling political parties. They had rival orientations, however, as events would demonstrate. Oca was fiercely opposed by Macapagal because of his intimate ties with the Lopez family, and he actively sought support from the Nacionalista Party leadership for his mayoral bid, which had been confirmed by LM's founding congress. Hernandez and Rafael would throw in their lot with the highest bidder; they eventually went along with a merger with the Liberal Party and received choice positions within Macapagal's administration. Sison and Lacsina had determined, prior to LM's formal launch, that they would use the new organisation to secure support for Indonesia from the Macapagal administration, and Cid largely followed their lead. For every one of these leaders, the tens of thousands of workers represented by the LM were just so much political capital.
Negotiations with Macapagal
The tensions at South Harbor were still simmering; Macapagal continued to claim that the incoming private operator of the port would not be obligated to honour the PTGWO contract and Oca's appeals before the CIR were still pending. Lacsina called for a national strike of all LM's member unions to begin on 16 May 1963 in support of the PTGWO, and then, along with Sison and Cid, carrying this threat in his pocket, he formed a secret delegation to negotiate with Macapagal the details of the political merger of the LM and LP, including the securing of appointments within the Macapagal government.Footnote 57
The political stakes must be clear: an extended strike on Manila's South Harbor would shut down imports and exports throughout much of the country too. Port workers in the southern islands had demonstrated in 1962 that they were prepared to strike in sympathy with their fellow workers from Manila. What is more, this was a strike not against a private employer but against the government itself and a port strike would thus bring workers into direct conflict with the state. A nationwide strike in support of such a struggle under the influence of a Marxist leadership would have immediately raised revolutionary political implications, but the PKP sought not to further the strike, but rather to use it and suppress it.
Macapagal appointed Lacsina to be head of a conciliation committee which included the Bureau of Customs commissioner—the man responsible for taking away the port jobs—and Justice Secretary Juan Liwag, who had drafted the argument that the PTGWO did not have collective bargaining rights. The threat of a nationwide strike of over 30,000 workers that would have shut down the ports, the banks, and a broad range of industries, was not being mobilised to secure the interests of the port workers or any section of the working class. Lacsina and Sison deployed this threat in order to end the political independence of the newly formed workers’ party, to secure salaried positions for the LM leadership, and to strengthen ties between Manila and Jakarta.
When Oca got wind of the negotiations he was furious and publicly disauthorised the LM negotiating team. Lacsina, Cid, Felixberto Olalia, Delia Medina, and several other LM leaders signed a secret resolution with Macapagal committing to the LM-LP merger.Footnote 58 Lacsina called off the nationwide strike just as the port workers began picketing South Harbor on 7 May, for he and Sison had just struck a deal to merge the workers’ party with the government that the workers were striking against.Footnote 59 They had deliberately isolated and betrayed the port workers.
By early July the secret deal was brought to public attention in the Chronicle, which on 2 July reported that the ‘recently achieved “solidarity” [of Oca's union with the other members of the LM] appeared headed for total disintegration as the reported “secret” coalition being forged by some of the leaders of the ‘Lapiang Manggagawa’ (Workers Party) with the Liberal Party came to light’.Footnote 60 ‘Recently,’ the article continued, ‘a number of LM officials reportedly signed a resolution formally coalescing the political organisation with the LP. According to reports, six have already affixed their signatures to the document’. Oca denounced the proposed merger as a ‘gross betrayal of the aims and objectives of the LM founding convention on Feb. 3’.Footnote 61
The eleven-member LM Directorate met at the D&E Restaurant on 23 July to resolve the dispute with Oca, and Lacsina pushed for a vote to go ahead with the merger. Oca responded that the ‘coalition was too big a matter to be decided by the directorate, the question should be put to a convention’, but Lacsina responded that ‘there was no time to call a convention’. When the directorate chose to go ahead with the vote, Oca stormed out of the meeting and the remaining ten members voted. Nine voted in favour; Hernandez abstained, ‘with the understanding that he would go with the majority’.Footnote 62 In 2003, Sison dishonestly claimed that Oca was expelled from the LM ‘because of his arbitrary use of the name of the KMP for pushing his personal interest’.Footnote 63 In truth, Oca was edged out of the LM in order to facilitate the planned merger with the LP and leading PKP member Olalia was installed as vice president to replace him.
Oca's aim throughout the strike was the furtherance of his own political interests in his bid for mayor of Manila, and he used the strike to secure the nomination of the Nacionalista Party as its candidate. As we will see, he used the strike as a thorn in the side of the Macapagal administration to win the support of the NP, while repeatedly lifting the picket lines to allow goods out of the port and ingratiating himself with the business community. The Associated Port Checkers Union (APCU) of Hernandez’ PTUC, a leading LM member, actively crossed the PTGWO picket line as well, thus directly sabotaging the port strike too: Hernandez gave explicit instructions to the 325 arrastre checkers and 130 ship checkers in the APCU to cross the picket.Footnote 64 At the same time Tan's FFW scabs were being ferried into South Harbor on Navy barges, and at the peak of tensions, Tan fielded 3,000 scabs on behalf of the Macapagal government. The scabs were not paid by management to work as most of Tan's men were not longshoremen at all. Rather they were paid to menace and attack the strikers. The scabs approached the picket lines armed with pipes, clubs, and pistols. Because they entered the port via military barge, they were not subject to search by the Manila Police Department (MPD), which claimed that the Customs Police was responsible for searching the scabs. The MPD meanwhile frisked striking workers and prevented them from bringing any weapons to the picket line.Footnote 65 The striking workers were repeatedly attacked. They fought courageously, but they were betrayed on every side—by Oca, by Hernandez, and above all, by the Communist Party leadership of Sison and Lacsina.
It is useful to consider the alternative course that the PKP could have taken. Using the Lapiang Manggagawa as its political base, it could have worked to win over the dock workers by supporting their strike, laboring at every turn to expose Oca's duplicitous role. Every time Oca lifted the picket on behalf of sections of the bourgeoisie, looking to further his own political ambitions, the dock workers, with increasing anger, expressed their desire to continue picketing. The PKP could have agitated among the workers against Oca, and having won over a base of support through this campaign, it could have called for Oca's expulsion and the election of a new leadership. The party could also have agitated among the other Manila unions, particularly those related to the shipping industry, to support the striking dock workers, and having won such support, it could have called for sympathy strikes. Connections could have been cultivated not only to other sections of the Filipino working class, but internationally. Workers on international shipping lines displayed immense sympathy for the striking South Harbor workers, passing the hat repeatedly to take up donations for them. These ties could have been deepened. José Hernandez could at the very least have been censured by the LM leadership for instructing his union members to cross the PTGWO picket lines.
Instead, Sison and Lacsina entered into a coalition with the ruling party, in the thick of the strike, while the administration was actively suppressing the workers. They sabotaged the strike to form an alliance with Macapagal. As Macapagal hired armed scabs and sent troops to crack down on the workers, Sison and Lacsina maintained a stony silence. They did not issue even a tepid, pro forma criticism. They were busy elsewhere, whipping up support for Macapagal and the Liberal Party. They hailed his land reform—drafted by Washington—as the ‘emancipation’ of the Filipino peasantry, and promoted Macapagal himself as a ‘revolutionary’.Footnote 66 Their actions were an unmitigated betrayal.
The Strike
On 18 May, a CIR judge handed down a ruling that the arrastre service was proprietary and the port workers thus had collective bargaining rights.Footnote 67 The Macapagal administration refused to accept the ruling, appealed, and on 11 June a panel of judges reversed the earlier decision and declared the arrastre service a governmental function and any strike therefore illegal.Footnote 68 On 21 June, Oca appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, and the workers continued their picket.Footnote 69
On 10 July, the strike turned bloody. According to the Chronicle, scabs threw grenades or makeshift bombs at the picket lines. Three explosive devices were hurled at the striking workers, injuring thirty-seven. Two workers were listed as seriously wounded and the remaining thirty-five needed hospitalisation. The police arrested a number of striking workers after the explosions, but none of the scabs.Footnote 70 By 12 July, there were ‘almost a thousand soldiers, marines, customs guards, and Manila policemen in battle formation’ on the pier.Footnote 71 Macapagal's Finance Secretary Perez held a press conference in which he stated that the bombings at the pier were not that serious and just ‘one of those things’.Footnote 72
The next day, Oca met with Perez in the Labor Department office where he agreed to a moratorium on the strike, and instructed the workers to unconditionally lift the picket line for 15 days. Oca met with Larry Henares, head of the Philippine Chamber of Industry (PCI), and Domingo Arcega of the Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, to assure them of his support for their business interests. Oca told the press that he reached the agreement because he ‘took cognizance of the adverse effects of the current strike on the national economy, the consumers, the importers, the manufacturers, distribution houses, workers and the cases of violence that have given rise to death and injuries to the parties involved’. He ascribed blame to no one for the violence, stating that he had agreed to the strike moratorium to ‘stave off an impending economic crisis’, and that he was ‘subordinating the union's individual and group interests to the general welfare’. He had ‘already contacted PCI men to lend equipment like forklifts to the customs arrastre service to clear the pier cargo jam’. Oca then spoke to the striking workers, calling on them to ‘sacrifice a little more for the sake of public interest’, and told the workers, ‘there is no reason for us not to lift the picket lines upon the request of a responsible segment of our society’.Footnote 73
The strength of the strike rested in its economic impact and with each lifting of the pickets Oca crippled the worker's power. On 27 July Oca convened the workers to discuss the resumption of the strike. The 15-day moratorium he had called was about to expire and the backed up goods had been cleared out by scab labor which had been allowed to move them off the port by Oca. Oca presented the workers with a compromise settlement which had been offered by the Macapagal administration. Half of the pier jobs would go to scabs and half of the striking workers would get their jobs back. The workers were furious; they were quoted in the Chronicle as saying, ‘We will have the whole piers or none at all.’Footnote 74 On 28 July, Oca announced to the press that he was extending the cessation of picketing for another week, and after holding the press conference he informed the workers of this. One week later, on 2 August, Oca announced that the PTGWO was resuming picketing. It was clear that he could no longer restrain the striking workers. He told the press of the resumed picketing in a joint announcement held with Finance Secretary Perez, in which both Perez and Oca assured the press that the mediation panel was succeeding, and had nearly reached a compromise agreement. At the same press conference, Oca announced that he was still planning on running for mayor on the LM ticket. He denounced the rest of the LM leadership as traitors for entering a deal with the LP.Footnote 75 This was the context in which on 6 August the LM merged with the LP, and Lacsina and Sison endorsed Macapagal as the champion of the people—the port workers seethed with anger at this, fueling the explosive strike on the waterfront.
The end of the independent LM
Over the first week of August 1963, Macapagal hosted the Manila Summit in which he and Sukarno established an alignment of political interests in opposition to the formation of Malaysia. The growing ties between Jakarta and Manila were precisely what the PKP, and in the background the PKI, sought in the political negotiations which they conducted through the LM with Macapagal.Footnote 76
On 6 August, after escorting Sukarno to his plane at the conclusion to the Manila Summit, Macapagal rode in a limousine from the airport to the presidential yacht, The Chief, where he oversaw the signing of the LM-LP merger.Footnote 77 It was his first official act in the wake of the Summit.
The meeting lasted for three hours. At its conclusion, a brief document, which had been drafted by Lacsina, entitled ‘Agreement to coalesce the Liberal Party and the Lapiang Manggagawa (Labor Party)’, was signed by Ferdinand Marcos, then president of the Liberal Party, and Cipriano Cid, president of the Lapiang Manggagawa.Footnote 78 The merger agreement stated that:
Aware of the epochal social and national reforms now being energetically carried out under the leadership of President Diosdado Macapagal;
Believing that nothing short of the unity of all forces for democratic change can assure the success of these reforms …
Realizing that the forces opposed to reform programmes have banded together under the banner of the Nacionalista Party; …
Determined that the Parties must give utmost support to the current Five-Year Socio-Economic Program of President Macapagal to hasten a life of abundance for our people in dignity and freedom;
agree to coalesce the parties effective immediately upon the following terms and conditions …Footnote 79
Several points stand out in this summation of reasons for the merger: Macapagal was hailed as ‘energetically’ carrying out ‘epochal’ reforms, opposition to which had ‘banded together’ in the NP; and the LM announced that it was giving its ‘utmost support’ to President Macapagal. The terms of this support were outlined in the merger document and included a commitment from the LM to collaborate with the LP to secure ‘electoral and public support’, and to ‘actively campaign for LP official candidates’. The LP committed to consult with the LM about appointments to government offices relevant to labor—this was a promise of kickbacks; and the opening of two slots on the LP slate for the Manila municipal board. Macapagal had already made the necessary arrangements. Four Manila city councilors were present during the meeting and Macapagal sought commitments from the councilors in the second and fourth districts that they would not run for re-election, making their slots available for LM candidates. He secured these commitments by offering one of them part-time governorship of the Development Bank of the Philippines and the other managership of the Social Security System.Footnote 80
Less than six months after it was founded, the Lapiang Manggagawa was no longer an independent party of the working class. The Stalinist leaders of the Communist Party—Sison and Lacsina—had traded this independence for an alliance with the capitalist class and merged the LM with the ruling party, a move politically useful to the PKP and financially lucrative to their bureaucrat partners.
On the same day that Macapagal and Lacsina met on the presidential yacht, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that the function of the arrastre service was proprietary and the strike was legal. The Court ordered the CIR to hear Oca's unfair labor practices case.Footnote 81 Oca once again offered to order his workers to return to work, ‘to maintain industrial peace for the protection of all concerned until the CIR has fully decided all aspects of the labor dispute on the merits’.Footnote 82 Oca led the workers in a thanksgiving mass held at the Manila Cathedral early the next morning.Footnote 83 Perez announced that the government was proceeding with public bidding on the arrastre service though the question of the labor contract was not yet settled.Footnote 84 On 9 August, Oca again ordered the striking workers to lift the picket lines, in response to an appeal by the Customs Brokers Association who requested to clear goods out of the port. By this point, the workers were deeply angered by Oca's repeated sabotage of the strike. Oca announced that picketing would resume on Monday 12 August and told the press that he could ‘no longer hold his impatient men, and feared what they might do when pickets were resumed on Monday’.Footnote 85
With the LM's authority behind him, Macapagal moved to break up the pickets with physical violence. On Monday afternoon, the first day of the resumed picket, Captain Salvador Yenko, acting general manager of the customs arrastre service responsible for supervising all scab labor at the port, together with an armed cohort of Philippine Military Academy (PMA) drop-outs, opened fire on the strikers, killing two—Rodolfo Navarro and Ignacio Villanueva—and critically wounding four. Yenko had driven a black Ford into the picket line, running over one striker, and when he could not get through the picket, he and his companions threw tear gas grenades among the striking workers and opened fire. A group of five hundred scabs armed with clubs and pipes immediately assaulted the picket line.Footnote 86 Perez suspended Yenko from his position and the next day murder charges were filed against Yenko and his seven companions. One of the murdered strikers had a twenty-two year old wife and ten-month-old child.Footnote 87 Oca's legal team also filed murder charges against MPD Brigadier General Eduardo Quintos and two of his officers for assisting Yenko and the scabs in their assault.Footnote 88 Macapagal threatened to declare a state of emergency at South Harbor, and seized the opportunity presented by the broken picket line to send 120 Army trucks to collect goods from the pier. Oca appealed to the striking workers to exercise ‘sobriety’, telling them to ‘let the wheels of justice take its [sic] course’.Footnote 89
The NP leadership saw in the outpouring of public sympathy for the murdered and assaulted workers a golden opportunity. With the LM-LP merger concluded but a week before, Liberal candidate for Mayor of Manila, Antonio Villegas, had significant union support behind his candidacy. The NP needed comparable backing. During its primaries, the Nacionalistas had already selected Joaquin Roces to stand as their mayoral candidate, but on 13 August, the top leadership of the NP met and decided to have Roces withdraw his candidacy and to appoint Oca as the NP candidate for mayor in his stead.Footnote 90
Oca staged a wake for the two murdered workers at union headquarters, with their bodies on display, and the NP concluded a deal with Oca allowing them to use the wake and the funeral of the murdered workers to make political stump speeches against Macapagal.Footnote 91 In return they made Oca the NP mayoral candidate, hoping that he would win over a significant portion of the labor vote from Villegas. As late as 10 August, four days after the formal LM-LP merger, Oca had still been publicly claiming that he was the LM candidate for mayor.Footnote 92 He staged a political rally on the weekend prior to the Monday shooting, telling his audience that
The so-called coalition between the LP and the LM is a political stunt cooked up by some Malacañang stooges and a few administration ‘captured’ labor leaders in a desperate effort to salvage the floundering LP image in the city of Manila.
The farcical coalition has no sanction of the 1060 delegates of the LM convention and the thousands and thousands of the rank and file of the LM who nominated us to be LM standard bearers for the Manila mayoralty race at a duly constituted convention.Footnote 93
Three days later, with the NP offer in hand, he dropped his claim to be the LM candidate for mayor and the last independent faction of the LM died seven months after the party's formation.
On 14 August, 48 hours after the murder of the two striking workers, a small coterie of NP leaders met in Senator Arturo Tolentino's Bayview Apartment penthouse to hammer out the final details, and at 11:30 pm, Roces officially withdrew his candidacy and Oca took the oath of membership in the NP administered by Tolentino. A Chronicle reporter was present to headline the news in the next morning's paper. Tolentino stated that Oca's candidacy was ‘a manifestation of our support for the labor movement and protest against the heartless negligence and indifference of President Macapagal towards the pier strike and the deaths and injuries that have been occasioned on the pier zone’.Footnote 94 NP vice mayoral candidate Alfredo Gomez would serve as legal counsel to the families of the two murdered workers, but Oca announced that he was dropping charges against Brig. Gen. Quintos and the two other police officers, stating that he had become convinced of the ‘impartiality of the MPD officers lately’.Footnote 95 The next day, Oca issued an appeal to ‘all workers in Manila to rally behind the NP candidates’.Footnote 96
On 16 August, Navarro, one of the two killed workers, was buried. Oca turned the event into a Nacionalista Party rally, an opportunity for photographs and choice quotations for the press; the NP senators delivered their stump speeches over a worker's corpse. The keynote speaker at the funeral was Macapagal's estranged vice president, Pelaez, who was campaigning for the NP. Pelaez announced that ‘the two bodies that lie in the piers are not the bodies of Navarro and Villanueva but that of democracy and freedom … they died so that we would understand there is much to fight for … If we who are living will have the guts and courage to fight this administration, they would not have died in vain’. Senator Roseller Lim then spoke, calling on ‘all labor’ to unite behind Oca. He attacked the LM-LP merger, by taking ‘potshots at some labor leaders whom he charged with having abandoned their companions when such “would suit their personal needs”’. Oca meanwhile appealed to his workers to respect the legal process, ‘[i]f our administration does not know how to respect the law let us show them that we, the small workers, know how. We could achieve our ends and get justice by always going through the legal processes.’Footnote 97
Lacsina and the LM moved to shore up the President in the face of these criticisms. Cesar de Leon, NATU's executive vice president, issued a public letter stating that the labor organisations ‘composing Lapiang Manggagawa are unreservedly lending their support to the Macapagal Administration in the forthcoming elections’.Footnote 98 The LM leadership busily set about putting this into practice. On 22 August, Macapagal met for an extended lunch with LM's leadership to discuss election work prior to his campaign foray into the Visayas.Footnote 99
The day after the funeral stump speeches, Oca issued another statement, ‘With the president washing his hands of our struggle for justice, we have to rely on the slow judicial process … but as long as you are behind me, we will win this fight. You are only on vacation with pay.’Footnote 100 The callousness of this statement is staggering. Oca was referring to a pending PTGWO legal petition for the workers to receive back wages during the strike. The workers were not receiving strike pay nor were they on vacation. They were courageously manning a picket line at which they were routinely assaulted, and some were in fact starving.
In mid-August, the body of a striker was found floating in a kangkong (water spinach) pond not far from his home in Bacoor. He had collapsed while ‘gathering edible leaves to feed his starving family’.Footnote 101 Interviews with striking workers in the 1 September issue of the Chronicle revealed that many strikers’ children were no longer able to attend school because of poverty; many families were relying on support from friends and extended family, and many, the Chronicle wrote, ‘are on the verge of starvation’. Eleuterio Vergara stated that his one-month-old son died of hunger during the strike. Martin Mondejar reported that two of his children had dropped out of school and he was eight months behind on rent, saying ‘Halos makakain dili kami’ (We are almost not eating). This was not because the union did not have funds. The Araneta family gave Oca over P10,000, ostensibly for the strike. Workers on visiting ships took up collections for their brothers on strike. On 12 July, the crew members of the SS President Cleveland passed the hat around and gave US$600 to Oca for the strike. The International Transportation Workers Federation contributed over US$2,000 to the strike.Footnote 102 On 16 September Oca was accused in a number of press accounts of spending some of the money donated on the construction of a private swimming pool.Footnote 103 A large portion of the funds likely went to Oca's election campaign. What is certain is this: none of the funds made it into the hands of the striking workers.
In early September, in the midst of the port strike, another explosive strike broke out. Three thousand Philippine Airlines (PAL) workers in the Philippine Airlines Employees Association (PALEA) union went on strike on 2 September. The US Embassy had previously noted that a PAL strike would have ‘a drastic effect since the airline is absolutely essential for quick communication between the scattered islands of the archipelago’.Footnote 104 By 6 September, Pan Am, Northwest and two other major international carriers were boycotting Manila because of the disruption to services caused by the PAL picketing. Macapagal issued a compulsory back-to-work order to the airline employees, threatening to use force if they disobeyed, but the workers defied Macapagal, remaining on the picket line which blocked the roads to the airport.Footnote 105 On 7 September, Macapagal ordered the Philippine Constabulary (PC) to break up the strike. Armed with automatic rifles with bayonets affixed, and accompanied by doberman pinscher attack dogs, the PC forcibly dispersed the workers, many of whom were injured and hospitalised, and at least one of whom had been stabbed by a bayonet.Footnote 106 Defense Secretary Macario Peralta met with union leaders and they called off the strike. Regular service resumed at the airport on 10 September.Footnote 107
Throughout this pitched struggle waged by the working class—as international trade and internal communications were shut down throughout the country—the Lapiang Manggagawa gave its enthusiastic support to Diosdado Macapagal and the ruling Liberal Party. Sison was instrumental in this. He used Macapagal's land reform programme, which converted sharecroppers into cash-rent tenants and which had been secretly drawn up by the Ford Foundation, to promote the claim that Macapagal was bringing about revolutionary change. Sison wrote the official government handbook on the Land Reform Code, which was printed by the Macapagal administration and which carried the name Lapiang Manggagawa on its cover. The volume carried the dedication, ‘To President Macapagal, For his relentless struggle to emancipate the Filipino peasant.’Footnote 108 Sison's introduction traced the struggle for revolution in the Philippines in an unbroken continuity from the Katipunan of Bonifacio, through the founding of the Communist Party, which ‘encouraged’ Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon to ‘pursue a program of social justice’, to Macapagal, whose land reform programme was the ‘resumption of the unfinished revolution’.Footnote 109 Portions of Sison's handbook were published in the major dailies in September as part of a birthday tribute to the President.Footnote 110
As government forces opened fire on workers, bayoneted workers and brutally suppressed the explosive class conflict of 1963, Joma Sison and Ignacio Lacsina played a crucial role in stabilising bourgeois rule. They defused a nationwide strike, worked mightily to foster illusions in the ruling class, and at every turn fought to prevent any possible emergence of political independence in the working class.
The end of the strike
On 23 August the CIR ruled that bidders for the arrastre service were legally obligated to honour the existing labor contract.Footnote 111 In response, Oca ordered the picket lifted even though Macapagal was still not allowing the workers to return to work. Macapagal filed a request for clarification with the court, disingenuously inquiring if the decision referred to the ‘existing labor contract’ with the PTGWO or with the scabs.Footnote 112 By 29 August the striking workers were demanding to go back on picket, but Oca appealed to the workers to ‘give the government ample time to reconsider its position … Let's give the government a chance’.Footnote 113 Picketing resumed and continued throughout September, intermittently lifted by Oca in response to requests from the business community. The strike ended abruptly on 26 September.Footnote 114
The Philippines and Indonesia concluded a US$200 million trade pact on 25 September, known as the Manila Memorandum.Footnote 115 The communiqué regarding the deal stated, ‘In view of the recent political events that have led to the severance of economic relations between Indonesia on one hand, and Malaya and Singapore, on the other, the Indonesian government has expressed its willingness to shift its traditional trade from these territories to the Philippines.’Footnote 116 The deal envisioned Manila replacing Singapore as an entrepôt for Indonesian exports, but the ongoing strike made the deal impossible. Macapagal replaced his customs secretary, and the new secretary signed a deal with Oca within 24 hours.Footnote 117
The deal returned 75 per cent of the striking workers to their jobs, on three of the four wharves of South Harbor, and gave the jobs on the remaining wharf to Tan's FFW scabs. Outraged that his men were not given the entire port, Tan and the scab union went on strike the same day, shutting down the port again.Footnote 118 The government's treatment of the scab strike was far kinder than its treatment of the PTGWO. No police were deployed, and no one was violently dispersed. The FFW strike gradually broke up as the numbers on picket dwindled daily. Scabs apparently do not picket well. By the second week of October the numbers had dwindled to less than a hundred. On 12 October, the strike died and the PTGWO workers returned to the harbour. Oca addressed the workers before they resumed their jobs, ‘I want you to work double time for the sake of national interests … let us exert all efforts to increase government income in the Bureau of Customs.’Footnote 119
A quarter of the PTGWO arrastre workers lost their jobs at the end of strike. Those who managed to return to work found their conditions and pay no better than before they first mounted the picket lines. One in four of the longshoremen with whom they now hauled cargo across the piers was a mortal enemy, a strikebreaker, hired muscle who had sought to break them in the fiercest battle of their lives. For the working class, the 1963 port strike ended in defeat.
The November 1963 election brought no clear victories: four Liberal senators were elected alongside four Nacionalistas; Oca lost the mayoral race; and the LM candidates were all defeated.Footnote 120 After the election, Macapagal doled out the spoils to his dutiful support base in the LM leadership. He awarded Cid a seat on the influential National Economic Council. Two of the five seats on the Social Security System board of directors were given to Eulogio Lerum and Carlos Santiago. Vicente Rafael was made a member of the CIR. Cipriano Malonzo was given a seat on the board of directors of the National Marketing Corporation.Footnote 121
Sison and the leadership of the Communist Party spent the first part of 1964 actively peddling their ally, Macapagal, to the masses. They used this as an opportunity to build, with government funding and support, a new organisation among the Central Luzon peasantry, Malayang Samahan ng mga Magsasaka (MASAKA, Free Federation of Peasants). By the latter part of the year, as Macapagal sought to renew happier ties with Washington, the PKP's alliance with the LP soured. Sison and the PKP began shopping for a better deal, signalling to the Nacionalista Party and its presidential candidate Marcos their availability as a political partner.Footnote 122
In the wake of the LP and NP conventions, the Lapiang Manggagawa fragmented. While Sison and Lacsina were eager to strike a deal with Marcos and the NP, much of the trade union apparatus, now comfortably ensconced in the LP administration, was loath to break ties with Macapagal. Twenty-one labor organisations, ‘with over 1,200 local chapters in more than 45 provinces’, broke away from the LM to establish a separate political party, calling itself the Consolidated Labor Party of the Philippines (CLPP).Footnote 123 The CLPP split from the LM because Lacsina and Sison were moving to break the LM from its 1963 coalition with the LP in order to back Marcos. Cid, ever the shrewd political operative, carefully played both sides as long as possible before finally backing Marcos. As late as the middle of 1965, Cid was still occasionally attending LP rallies.Footnote 124 Among those who backed Macapagal was Oca, for after Oca lost in his bid as NP candidate for mayor, Macapagal quietly made peace with his former nemesis.Footnote 125 The impetus for the LM's break with Macapagal and alliance with the NP came entirely from Lacsina and Sison. As they had orchestrated the merger with the LP two years prior, so now they threw themselves into the campaign to strike a deal with Marcos and provide the support of the working class to his party.
Sison delivered a speech justifying the support of the Kabataang Makabayan (Nationalist Youth)—the new youth wing of the PKP—for Marcos. He told his audience, ‘While the Liberal Party and the Party for Philippine Progress are clearly reactionary in their platforms … the Nacionalista Party has manifested the most protestation for nationalism. It is because within its ranks there are those who would rather defend the interests of national entrepreneurs.’Footnote 126 He delivered a similar speech to MASAKA, while Ignacio Lacsina arranged LM's realignment.Footnote 127 Marcos had the backing of the national bourgeoisie, the working class and peasantry needed to lend them support.
As rival leaders tied one fragment of the LM to Macapagal and dragged another behind Marcos, the organisation effectively dissipated. Remnants of its apparatus remained in the hands of Lacsina, who attempted to resurrect the LM in 1967 by formally changing its name to the Socialist Party of the Philippines, but nothing came of it.Footnote 128 The Lapiang Manggagawa died in 1963.
I uncovered the existence of the port strike quite accidentally, while working carefully through newspapers on Konfrontasi, the tensions between Manila, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur and the creation of Maphilindo. That a protracted public event of this magnitude could disappear is indicative of what can be lost even within the recent historical record.
The rediscovery of the port strike demonstrates that for scholarship to uncover the struggles of the working class in all their political complexity, in countries like the Philippines where they remain largely undocumented, it is not sufficient to read the archives of the state ‘against the grain’. It is necessary to approach those of working class organisations with a similar hermeneutic of suspicion, to extract the voices of the oppressed from behind the machinations of their leaders. This is particularly true because of the domination which Stalinist parties, dressed in the language of Marxism and the heritage of the Russian Revolution, managed to exercise in the twentieth century. With every reorientation of their political line, often bound up with the establishment of ties with a new section of the ruling elite, the leadership found it necessary to rewrite its past. Leon Trotsky aptly characterised this process, ‘With every major historical zig-zag, they are compelled to revamp history all over again’.Footnote 129 When Sison and Lacsina allied the LM to Macapagal they betrayed the port strike; when they shifted allegiance to Marcos two years later, they buried the evidence. The courageous, life-and-death struggle of 3,000 workers who shut down the port of Manila for four months in 1963 disappeared from history.
