MANILA (UCAN) -- As expected, labor unions, advocates of worker rights and other critics focused their Labor Day commemorations on government's failure to use its authority and resources to ensure just wages and job security.

For me, May 1 always recalls two young "worker" friends, Andy and Marivic.

Andy was 14 when he began helping his uncle paint movie billboards in Leyte province. On visits to Manila, he narrated his adventures of sitting most of the day on a wooden plank held by two ropes about 15 feet above the ground.

Marivic was 13, soon to graduate from primary school, when she died in a hospital while being treated for lung cancer. Before her breathing worsened, she had helped her mother sew rags for sale on the streets. The rags were made of fabric scraps that a businessman delivered to her shanty home.

When the girl died, doctors told UCA News they could not say if fibers and dust caused her lung disease, but those materials did not help her health.

At the burial, Marivic's weeping mother lamented the death of the family's hope for a "promising" future. The widow explained that relatives had been counting on the bright little girl to pull them out of misery.

Marivic was not as "fortunate" as Andy, who said his uncle is "kind" for letting him live in his house "for free." Besides painting, Andy also helps carry water from a nearby well. The boy never went to high school and no business would hire him, so he said he is "lucky" to have such a relative.

As Andy fends for himself, his siblings have more from what his father's meager wages as a farm worker provide and from the money his mother sends from Olongapo City, northwest of Manila, where she had gone to find work.

According to a 2001 survey of the National Statistics Office, Marivic and Andy were among more than two million Philippine children aged 5-14 engaged in economic activities. The report says this figure comprises 11 percent of such Filipino youngsters. About 1.4 million reportedly are boys, and about 300,000 of all children in that age group were working, not attending school.

Over the past four decades, more than 10 laws and administrative directives were issued to address the problem, but children still work -- mostly farming, but also mining, diving, scavenging, peddling and doing many other jobs.

The state has the authority and resources to lead the effort to eliminate the problems of workers, including children, so taking it to task on Labor Day is valid. But people engaging child laborers or patronizing economic behavior that involves child workers share the blame. Also guilty are parents who push their children to leave school so as to work - sadly, including prostitution.

I was encouraged to see some labor unions marking the recent Labor Day with activities stressing that workers are struggling with their employers and the government, but also among each other within their own unions and families.

National media cited Nenita Gonzaga, co-founder of Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement), telling some 100 mine workers at a Labor Day forum in the northern Philippines that workers should arrive on time for their marches and their unions should also fight for human dignity, not just money.

Still, some families claim desperation compels them to stop the schooling of their children and make them work. Church ministries to workers clearly have to enhance values formation and deepen workers' spirituality. Poverty destroys the spirit, but it can also inspire solidarity, especially among the needy.

On Mindanao Island in the southern Philippines, parishioners have started "children's Basic Ecclesial Communities" among families of farmers, fishermen and workers. Lay-led family renewal movements could strengthen their links and collaborate more effectively with diocesan and parish ministries to workers.

As such ministries battle the exploitation of children by families, employers and society as a whole, they could also help reform Filipino family values that tend to regard children merely as economic and material resources.

Families hopefully then will become the first school of labor envisioned in Laborem Exercens (On Human Work). In that 1981 encyclical of Pope John Paul II, children are introduced to work in the context of service to others, cooperation and contributing to the common good.

In an interview aired by Church-run Radyo Veritas on April 30, Archbishop Angel Lagdameo of Jaro, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, noted this point when he reminded Catholics that the Church also commemorates the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker on International Labor Day.

He urged listeners to pray for all workers and their families, especially in this time of low income levels, inadequate jobs and rising food prices.

Archbishop Lagdameo asked Catholics to pray that the government will provide employment opportunities to workers, and workers will "learn to trust God" and keep hoping with "sacred love" -- as did Saint Joseph the carpenter, a man of humble means who cooperated with God and helped fulfill His plan of salvation.

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NJ Viehland has been actively involved with UCA News since 1985. She is in charge of UCAN operations in the Philippines.

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(Accompanying photos available at here)

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