Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
At the third Annual Sikap-Gawa Awards of the Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference on Human Development

[Delivered at the Hotel Nikko Manila Garden, Makati, May 3, 1994]

Pursuing industrial peace

THIS EVENING truly belongs to this year’s Sikap-Gawa awardees. These outstanding persons, as well as past winners, serve as role models in the various award categories in which they have obtained well-deserved recognition and merit.

Your praiseworthy individual achievements have collectively advanced the cause of industrial peace—a condition we all wish for but manage to attain only through great effort, sacrifice and submission to the greater good.

Industrial peace is an important objective, more so today, because it is crucial in bringing us closer to our quest for excellence, competitiveness, progress and prosperity in the soonest time.

National need

Peace is indeed much needed today in our country, whether it is in the frontlines of public safety between our uniformed forces and our estranged brothers who have been misled into taking up arms against the State or at the lines of confrontation that are sometimes drawn between employers and workers.

Industrial peace is being pursued in several areas. In fact, the Sikap-Gawa Awards are given to the persons who have made outstanding contributions to the advocacy of industrial peace; collective-bargaining negotiations and agreements; labor-management cooperation; productivity and quality; and training and research.

Without doubt the search for peace on the industrial front is being effectively pursued in all of these fields. Let me make a brief comment on each of them.

Advocacy of industrial peace is a most valuable endeavor, and provides the peacemaker or advocate with the opportunity to make the most direct impact on industrial relations.

Resolving labor-management disputes is a difficult task. It requires both the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job. The negotiator-peacemaker needs to be cool and levelheaded, for all too often he finds himself caught in the crossfire of contentious situations. But his consolation is that, as the Beatitudes declare: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Labor-management cooperation strengthens industrial peace, for it harmonizes and synergizes the relationship between the principal partners in production—labor and management. This peaceful partnership at the workplace is an idea whose time has come. All over the Philippines, workers and employers are forging social compacts among themselves, pledging adherence to a more interactive, consultative and productive mode of work.

Labor-management committees

A significantly increasing number of companies are establishing labor-management committees. These committees institutionalize a give-and-take relationship and serve as effective vehicles for deepening industrial harmony between supervisors and workers at the shop-floor level, management and unions at the company level, and employers and national union leaders at the industrial and national level.

Your awardees tonight, as well as past honorees, are proficient and successful masters of establishing and cementing labor-management cooperation.

In this regard, let me also pay tribute to the two institutions that significantly contributed to spreading and having the idea of setting up labor-management committees take hold all over the land. I refer to the Center for Labor Relations Assistance of the Department of Trade and Industry and the School of Labor and Industrial Relations of the University of the Philippines.

We must exert our utmost to make industrial peace prevail in our workplaces, but we must regard this as a means and not an end-all. We must go further, for industrial peace makes possible and facilitates the accomplishment of other important goals.

Productivity and quality

Unless harnessed to achieve tangible gains in productivity and quality, labor-management cooperation by itself could be a meaningless exercise.

The enhancement of productivity and quality can effectively make our economy truly globally competitive. It fortifies our bid to attain the status of a newly industrializing country, the goal we envision in the framework of development we call “Philippines 2000.”

When Philippine products and Filipino workmanship become internationally recognized, when our goods and services shall have earned a reputation for excellence, when our workers’ efforts shall have been consistently marked out as world-class, then we can claim to have arrived.

Thus I especially appreciate the BBC’s inclusion of productivity and quality among the Sikap-Gawa Award categories.

Collective-bargaining agreements (CBAs) compose the “social compacts” mutually formulated by workers and employers. But more than just agreements on the terms of employment, CBAs reflect democracy and social justice at work in our land. When employers and workers are able to forge these compacts to govern their work relationships in a just and peaceful process of negotiation, then we ensure the stability of industrial relations.

We cannot overestimate the value of training, research and education in each of the areas I mentioned and to the broader search for industrial peace.

While not directly involved in the labor-management interface, research provides enlightenment on the issues and specific matters of contention between labor and management. There can be no denying the worth of scientific information, empirical data and hard facts in the process of negotiations.

Training is a requisite for research, since workers and managers must know how to interact effectively in order to arrive at peaceful and cooperative modes of workplace relations.

As to basic education, I have always stressed that our system must provide a strong foundation in English, science, math and values with a curriculum that is at least comparable to our neighbors in ASEAN and other developing countries around the world.

Measures of educational achievements such as those in science, technology and mathematics have expanded, beyond mere national measures, to higher regional and international standards.

An event in science and technology

The enactment of the Science and Technology Scholarship Law (Republic Act 7687) was an event because it signals a new, strong thrust in our efforts to develop our country’s capabilities in science and technology, particularly the creation of a multidisciplinary pool of scientific and technological talent. With an annual target of about 3,500 scholars in science and technology under this law, we will not only input fresh talent into our stream of modernized agriculture and industrial expansion but also foster greater interest among the youth in science and technology courses.

Relevant to this, I also recently signed into law R.A. 7686, or the Dual-Tech Training Program—which will combine in-plant with in-school training for all our young people who take up vocational and technical education.

By concentrating on the development of new industries and new skills that require brain power more than large amounts of capital or material resources, we can leapfrog into the twenty-first century.

It can be done. The Filipino mind is up to the task, but it needs to be encouraged and supported as a matter of State policy.

The adversariness that had dominated the relationship between and among trade unions, employers and Government unfortunately remains with us, to some extent, today.

Since we restored democracy in 1986, however, we have made significant strides in fostering respect and cooperation among ourselves toward greater economic and political empowerment.

The age of global liberalization and competition

Desirably, the programs we pursue must respond to the fast-changing world around us. This is a world that will not always wait for our consensus.

The growing economic competition in the global arena, fueled by the dizzying pace of technological progress, requires that we immediately put our house in order, shape up as a national team to compete, or otherwise perish.

The World Trade Organization is about to be operationalized. The various groupings—ASEAN/AFTA, the European Union, NAFTA and APEC, among others, demand much of us, as a national society, and will test our abilities to respond, to adapt and to excel. Our strategies for competitiveness must therefore be put in place and operationalized.

In the face of stiff global economic competition, the roles of companies and unions can no longer be that of gladiators engaged in a duel to the death, but that of seasoned diplomats peacefully and skillfully negotiating for mutually beneficial ends.

And in this arena, we must not be adversarial competitors, but team players with different but complementary roles to play. While some differences of opinion may remain among us and will be tolerated in our democracy, we should all be willing to make sectoral sacrifices for larger societal goals.

My Administration values all your contributions to the multisectoral summits and the consultations we have undertaken for structural reform. They have helped shape our policies and have guided us in considering our options for moving forward.

This is also why, despite the tempting overtures of forces both from within and without the country that call for galvanized and unilateral decisions of Government on economic and political issues, I have stuck to the consultative and consensus-building process.

For while the decisions we need to make might be slow in coming at first because of such consultations, the decisiveness with which we are able to carry them out afterward more than compensates for the little time lost. This will enable our economic recovery to proceed on the basis of sound judgment and resolute action.