Work and freedom

Commentary

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
9:24 pm | Thursday, September 20th, 2012

[On the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty are the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”]


On the last Sunday of July we took a night cruise around lower Manhattan, the New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. The statue stands out in the bay, far from the lights of Wall Street and the financial center that burn day and night. I never guessed as we headed out at sunset that I would spend most of the evening thinking about my old immigrant relatives and the unemployed men of the urban poor areas of Metro Manila.

Our boat slowed as we approached Freedom Island where the statue rises; we drifted closer until we were almost underneath it. We saw it in silhouette against the last light in the Western sky. With its pedestal, it towers to the height of a 25-story building. The face of the statue as it looked down with deep concern on the poor and powerless people of New York, seemed wrapped in the type of head scarf Muslim women wear. Perhaps the goddess Athena looked down on ancient Athens from the Acropolis in just the same way Bicolanos might think of Our Lady of Peñafrancia.

A few hundred meters away was Ellis Island, where millions of poor immigrants landed in the 1920s-1930s, including my parents, aunts and uncles. Poor people were unloaded at Ellis Island; well-off passengers sailed on to Manhattan. For all passengers, especially for the poor, the statue was a great symbol of hope. It was the sign they were welcome in America and could begin life again in the new country. There would be problems, but the immigrants would be able to get jobs with which to raise their families, and they would be able to do so in security and freedom, protected by the country’s laws and labor unions.

It dawned on me that work and security/freedom are exactly what the men in the urban poor areas of Metro Manila are asking for.

There are government programs in the Philippines that help with income and microfinance, but they are usually for the women. This is not to criticize such programs but to highlight the great need for jobs for the men, especially the younger ones. What will happen to our society if the men are basically inutil and have to be carried along by the women? So few decent jobs are now available that the drug industry is one of the biggest employers of young men in the slums.

Can government make an extraordinary effort to provide jobs for the urban poor men? It seems unlikely that our leading job-creating industries—tourism and call centers—can employ the urban poor. Can the government, then, provide work by sponsoring public works programs? President Aquino promised to do this in the Covenant with the Urban Poor that he signed on March 6, 2010, in Del Pan, Tondo. In the covenant there is a section that discusses jobs for the poor communities. There is mention of public works created by government, and jobs that might be paid for by a combination of cash and food. The number of these jobs must be multiplied many times over:

“We will create large-scale public works programs that can generate a substantial number of jobs for poor men and women. At the onset of our term, we will emphasize labor-intensive public works programs that can generate a significant number of jobs for our poor people and give them access to at least the minimum amounts of money, food and dignity needed for their daily survival and well-being.”

The International Labor Organization has recommended that the Philippines use labor-intensive work processes in the infrastructure programs it funds. This will increase the number of men employed by 25 percent. Can the new flood control program employ such labor-intensive practices?

The Tzu Chi Foundation is a practitioner of public-works-type programs. During the recent post-flood cleanup work in resettlement areas in Montalban, it paid the people living there P400 a day to do the cleanup work. The work was done. The people had food to eat, and the men had their dignity.

There are many problems that can be solved through these types of public works: tree planting, for example, building of dikes and digging of water catchments.

We compete for the heart of the poor. If the men have work, even humble tasks at first, they will feel they have a stake in society. If they are unemployed, they are vulnerable to very destructive forms of alienation.

The Irish who came to the United States in the late 1920s, including my relatives, had just ended a civil war. There was nothing much for them in Ireland, especially for those who were on the losing side in that war. Most had only a fourth-year elementary education. America gave them jobs. They weren’t intellectually demanding jobs—construction workers, stevedores and transit employees for men, and waitresses and housemaids for women—but they gave the immigrants a foothold in the country and basic dignity. They were “making it in New York.” Their children had a chance to go to college and become doctors and scientists.

Public works projects will help our urban poor men in Metro Manila repeat such a transformation.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates (urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com).

Hopeful approaches to homelessness

Commentary
By: Gerald M. Nicolas
Philippine Daily Inquirer


“So there are also squatters in Korea?” an urban poor mother and leader sitting beside me quipped in Filipino while looking at photos of so-called “vinyl houses” being flashed on the screen. (Some 4,900 families evicted from various places in Seoul occupy vacant spaces without permission and build shelters made of vinyl, thus the name.) But instead of correcting her for using a politically incorrect term for people without security of tenure (the more acceptable term nowadays is “informal settlers”), I replied: “That’s because we don’t see them in Korean telenovelas.”

I wished that the 500 or so urban poor leaders inside the convention hall shared her candid realization upon seeing the pictures that spoke volumes of the global nature of the problem of land and tenure insecurity in cities. It had probably dawned on her that the 3 million Filipino families living in slums and without legal land or housing tenure, were not alone in waking up daily to the possibility of getting displaced and having their houses and lives destroyed. Had they known that close to 4.5 million people in the world were affected by evictions between 2007 and 2008 and that 55 percent of these happened in Asia, according to the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, they would have left the venue feeling more depressed and helpless than ever.

Or probably not.

Optimism was palpable inside the hall where community leaders from 12 countries in Asia—from Korea to Pakistan to Burma (Myanmar) to the Philippines—gathered for the launching of a regional assembly of people’s organizations called the Urban Poor Coalition Asia or UPCA. What was remarkable about the assembly was that despite the differences in mother tongues, the language of hope to address a shared issue—the threat of forced eviction—echoed loud and clear among “Asian friends.”

Listening to the reports (or reading the English phrases and sentences in their PowerPoint presentations), one could see the richness of experience of the urban poor, in devising and adopting different strategies and approaches in empowering themselves to resist forced evictions. In all the countries participating in the UPCA, community-level savings mobilization proved practical. In Thailand, for example, communities have compulsory savings of 200 baht per month per household (or only P10 per day). One citywide network was able to buy a parcel of land for soon-to-be evicted families “with our own fund” and a loan from the government and development organizations like the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. The property is located very near the original community, ensuring proximity to factories and other employment opportunities in the city.

Advocating housing rights through coalition-building and networking is also an essential strategy for influencing policies and challenging practices by government. In Nepal, the city network that includes women and youth held dialogues with political parties and explained its agenda to the public through various media. As a result, local governments in the cities of Bharatpur and Biratnagar have given free land for housing and have allocated a budget for citywide upgrading projects. In the Philippines, networks such as the Urban Poor Alliance stepped up the anti-eviction advocacy by entering into a covenant with President Aquino in 2010. So far, the allocation of P10 billion per year for in-city medium-rise housing projects for informal settlers along waterways has been the most significant (but yet to be realized) milestone of this engagement with the national government.

In-depth, detailed and, at best, participatory research has also gained increased importance in designing the strategies employed by many organized urban poor to prevent forced evictions. Indonesian delegates reported the significant contribution of technical assistance provided by architects and engineers in determining the magnitude of informal housing along Ciliwung River in east Jakarta and in capacitating the affected families in studying flood mitigation measures. It also proved helpful in proposing low-cost housing designs in accordance with the aspirations of the communities. In Korea, the NGO Asia Bridge conducted surveys to help assess the general condition of vinyl-house settlements in Seoul and generated maps to locate potential areas for upgrading and propoor development.

Nothing in the reports claimed that a single strategy can address the problem of homelessness. It has been a combination of approaches complementing each other. A community organization cannot rely solely on savings generation without trying to compel government to open opportunities for grassroots participation in the land market and land use. Neither can anti-eviction mobilization activities provide a long-term solution to tenure insecurity without sufficient and community-managed resources for the social preparation of would-be affected families. Research is needed to find out specific principles that will guide advocacy regarding what constitutes an adequate and legally acceptable housing intervention. There can be more strategies depending on the context and shared values of people, and in the end, the different strategies aim to achieve the same goal: tenure security and housing for the poor. Hope springs from allowing people’s organizations to explore innovative ways for solving their issues, different opportunities for building partnerships, and alternative venues for working with other stakeholders, especially government.

Finding Andres Bonifacio

Commentary
By: Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer


I was invited recently to a meeting of the Center for Patriotic Initiatives where the topic for discussion was: “Two Years After Arroyo: Prospects and Challenges to the Patriotic Forces.” Among the invited speakers were Francisco Nemenzo, former president of the University of the Philippines; political analyst Ramon Casiple; and former Army Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim, now deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Customs. I was deeply flattered to be invited with such men. I wondered, of course, if a mistake had been made in inviting me.

I couldn’t go in the end because I hurt my hip, but I knew what I would have said. I would have talked of the “meeting” that took place late last year between the urban poor and Andres Bonifacio. That meeting capped, in a real if limited way, the development of urban poor leaders, so that they and others like them are a challenge today to the patriotic forces. The urban poor and Bonifacio met like long lost relatives.

That meeting was arranged by Professor Charleston “Xiao” Chua of Dela Salle University. We met Xiao by chance while he was giving a lecture on the Tejeros Convention in Ternate, Cavite. He brought the past to life, as he talked of Bonifacio’s last days. He took his students to the actual historical sites of the events. And they saw the cells where Bonifacio was kept, and heard stories of his last days from the local people who had heard them from their ancestors. My wife and I, for example, heard the school principal in Maragondon point out the acacia tree where, her parents told her, Bonifacio would often urinate on his way in or out of his cell in the convento there.

We arranged for Xiao to lead a visit of the poor people we work with through the towns of Kawit, Ternate, Tanza, Naic and Maragondon, and finally to the trail that leads up into the mountains where Bonifacio and his brother Procopio were killed by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo’s men. They sang patriotic songs there in the late afternoon. The poor, most of whom are from Tondo and neighboring areas, were captivated by the life and beliefs of Bonifacio. They identified with him.

They learned that Bonifacio was far more than the warrior with a bolo, as Jose Rizal was much more of a warrior than the peaceful non-violent leader portrayed in our textbooks. They learned Bonifacio had a total plan for the reform of life in the Philippines. They identified with Bonifacio because he, too, was poor and, like many of them, had to work to raise younger brothers and sisters. They admired how he struggled to find a place for himself in society. Bonifacio preached comradeship, brotherhood (and sisterhood), kindness and charity to one another as well as the need to fight for one’s rights. The poor found themselves very comfortable with Bonifacio’s emphasis on care for others and with his vision of the Philippines. They especially enjoyed his understanding of freedom which is kaginhawaan, which seems very similar to the “peace” spoken of in John’s Gospel (Jn. 20:19-23).

The poor we work with had undergone two long learning seasons in their lives before they “met” Bonifacio. The first season was community organization. It was spent struggling with government and the powerful for land, housing, basic services, better education, job opportunities and respect. Not so different from the Bonifacio’s patriotic struggle. The second “season” was their political work during the 2010 election where they chose their candidate at meetings of 300 leaders, and then acted as regular party workers, canvassing voters, setting up offices, keeping in contact, witnessing the counting, and finally celebrating victory and bemoaning defeat. They outgrew the political fragmentation of the poor that had allowed venal politicians to grab their votes in exchange for little food, little money and airy promises.

In the years 2005-2008 they thought of having their own political party which they called Poor People’s Party. Its vision:

•A pro-poor agenda: a party working on the basic issues of all poor in the cities and in provinces; on the issues of industrial laborers, farm workers, fisherfolk, peasants and small farmers, informal sectors, youth, the aged, tribal people, women, differently disabled persons and the like;

• National in scope: a party fielding candidates in barangay and local government elections, and in the years to come in provincial and national elections;

• Dedicated to the people’s cause and to the equality of all: a party whose leaders are knowledgeable about their given tasks and duties; hot-headed but strong-willed; and neither corrupt nor corruptible;

• Strongly anchored on the social teachings of the Catholic, Protestant and Muslim faiths.
Even before the poor met Bonifacio they shared, it seems, his manner of thinking about reform.
In the two periods, the poor learned how to analyze their situation to find what was truly good for them and what was the common good; to make strategy and tactics; and finally to have the courage to act in a mass-based, democratic and nonviolent manner, including in electoral politics. Add the inspiration of Bonifacio and you have a people ready for reform.

The urban poor are the challenge today to the patriotic forces. The poor desire reform more than any other sectors of the population because they have so little of power and wealth now. Many have the experience and capability to work for reform.

I would have ended my remarks at that meeting by quoting the words of Jesus: “The harvest is great, but the laborers are few. Pray the Lord of the harvest to send more workers into His fields.” (Lk. 10:02)

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates.