Sto. Tomas, do Filipino workers a favor and resign now
DOLE’s Patricia Sto. Tomas is saying that she wants to resign and move on to a less stressful environment.
Gad, this is the best news I’ve heard in a long while!
She should leave the government service completely. Her leadership in the DOLE has turned the already infamous agency into an even more viciously anti-worker, anti-poor institution. It’s simply unbelievable that after all the horror she has wreaked in the welfare and very lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipino workers, she can still face herself in the mirror every morning.
She will never be able to wash the blood off her hands - the blood of the Hacienda Luisita farmworkers massacred in 2004; or the blood of Ka Ding Fortuna, the president of the Nestle Union in Canlubang who was murdered by the military working in tandem with the Nestle management.
Like her boss Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Sto. Tomas is a bureaucrat without the slightest scruple against selling out the Philippines and Filipinos to most expolitative businesses and employers.
It would take up more space than that available in this blog account to narrate the evil that this official has committed against the Filipino working class. I am filled with so much hatred for this…person who refuses to see how much damage her decisions on the hundreds of labor cases she has handled through the years. She wielded her authority like a killing knife, striking down the justified demands of workers for improved working conditions, employment benefits, humane treatment.
Sto. Tomas proved her mettle as a corrupt bureaucrat and an immoral and inhumane person when she assumed jurisdiction over the strikes at Hacienda Luisita and Nestle. Her decisions on these two strike cases alone will gone down in the history of the Philippine labor movement as among the most treacherous.
As for her entire record, it is steeped in blood. Single-handedly, with her sweeping signature she signed the virtual death warrants of workers who filed cases against their employers, corporations and their unfair labor practices and violation of countless labor and union laws. Daan-daan libong welgista at manggagawa ang nawalan ng trabaho, at nasira ang buong kabuhayan, at kasama nito ang kasalukuyan at posibleng kinabukasan ng kanilang mga anak.
A high school classmate emailed me recently if I didn’t think that there should be ‘balance’ in society. He was referring to activists and the very people and system they’re protesting against.
I had to restrain myself from issuing a passionate response (because I really don’t think he understood the depth of his question); but I thought about it.
Why is it that very people who call activists ‘unreasonable’ and ‘too demanding’ and ‘noisy’ stay essentially mum when it comes to the the day-to-day developments in the Philippines that expose that democracy, freedom and justice are but empty words?
