Right Again

Today
Monday, September 21, 1998
OPINION

TECHNICALLY, one could find fault again with President Estrada's latest remarks, this time on the Philippine Airlines labor/management—or rather Lagman/management—impasse. And yet his words ring true and right.

Speaking over the heads of misquoting newspapers, Estrada himself said on the Lopez-owned ABS-CBN radio station dzMM: "Here, with this agreement, the lawyers and the labor leaders may lose their jobs."

He was referring to Lucio Tan's obnoxious corporate legal counsel in PAL and those who are widely and fearfully believed to be self-appointed emissaries of the Alex Boncayao Brigade to the PAL controversy.

"The laborers will profit along with the management and they will not need labor leaders," Estrada pointed out.

"What's a CBA for if the company has closed down? Can you eat the CBA?" Estrada added sarcastically.

And yet, in the abstract, the President's words might be read as manifesting an unpresidential disregard of the constitutional right to organize by labor.

But the President does not govern in the abstract. He faces the very concrete situation of a country on the verge of communicating with its various parts by donkey or by felucca, what with the dissolution of thinly asphalted roads under just four days of unrelenting downpour and the final grounding of the national airline.

Indeed, the Lagman brothers are insisting, not so much on the protection of labor rights, as on their senseless sanctification in a dead and soon to be nonexistent company. Presumably, to enhance working conditions about to evaporate and protect jobs soon to be gone. Smart.

As for Lucio Tan's unavailability for further consultation after knocking off from labor talks every morning at 3 a.m., the guy may just be sleeping off a living nightmare after finally realizing that he is wasting his time and more of his money talking about a situation that can go only one way now: the appointment of one Lagman brother as Chairman of the Board and President of PAL, and the other as Chairman and Treasurer of Fortune Tobacco and Allied Bank, just two of the many Tan companies that have been milked for PAL.

For PAL, it is—as for the dysfunctional cyborg in Blade Runner—really "time to die."