Member list may be used to violate rights – ACT

MANILA, Philippines — Citing previous statements made by Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte against their group, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) on Sunday said there is no guarantee that the Department of Education (DepEd) will not use their list of members to violate their rights.

In a statement, the ACT maintained that there is no need for the agency’s central office to collect the list of its members as it is DepEd that approves and implements the Automatic Payroll Deduction System (APDS) every month.

“ACT members and regional unions are in adherence to the existing guidelines on the APDS matter... Accredited regional unions that have APDS religiously update their members’ status monthly,” said the group.

“As with DepEd’s justification that the memorandum was to address employees’ complaints of wrong deductions of monthly membership dues, this can be simply resolved by fixing their record mechanisms without compromising the privacy and safety of all other employees,” it added.

The DepEd on Saturday denied that its memorandum requesting for a list of union members is a form of “profiling” for the government’s anti-insurgency campaign.

It said the purpose of the request was to “centralize, connect, update and improve” the agency’s human resource systems, particularly the APDS.

“This is especially relevant amidst the regular complaints from employees over inaccurate, questionable and unwarranted salary deductions for loan remittances and membership dues,” the agency said.

It released to the media copies of similar memoranda requesting for a list of members of the Teachers’ Dignity Coalition and the DepEd Teachers’ Union.

While it was supposedly issued on June 14, several online users pointed out the gap in numbering of the three memoranda. The one involving ACT was numbered 2023-01-5591, while the other two were 2023-01-5724 and 2023-01-5725.

DepEd also claimed that it was publicly available, but only the one involving ACT was uploaded on the DepEd Calabarzon website. The other two were only made available to the media after inquiry.

Stigmatizing unions

The ACT maintained that such acts “seek to stigmatize its work, repress its advocacies, and restrict civic space from teachers and education workers who are critical of the government.”

“ACT has all the reasons to ring the alarm for there is no guarantee that such documents will not be used against ACT and its members, knowing that the current Secretary and Vice President Duterte is engaged in relentless and malicious red-tagging of ACT,” it said.

“This is opening the big possibility of violating ACT’s and its members’ right to association, freedom of expression and protection of privacy. We urge DepEd to go after abusive loan sharks and lending institutions instead and spare unions and teachers’ organizations,” added the group.

Duterte, also co-vice chair of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, has repeatedly accused ACT of having links with communist groups.

The teachers’ group has filed a red-tagging complaint against the Vice President before the International Labor Organization over her statements.

ACT said it was not the first time that profiling activities were conducted on its members. It cited a 2018 internal memorandum from the Philippine National Police Intelligence Directorate and a 2021 internal instruction from DepEd.

“This is a clear violation of the right to freedom of association, freedom of expression and the right to privacy. This adds up to the long list of cases of violations already submitted to the International Labor Organization,” said the ACT.

Constitutional violation

In a statement, the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) denounced the DepEd memorandum asking for the names of teachers who associated themselves with ACT unions and are making use of the automatic payroll deduction system, stressing that this “brazenly orders infringements of the ACT teachers’ basic rights and freedoms.”

“The DepEd Memo violates the constitutional rights to form unions for purposes not contrary to law and to freedom of speech or expression, which, under the Bill of Rights, cannot be abridged,” NUPL said.

The memorandum was likened to the profiling scheme implemented by the Philippine National Police in 2019 through memoranda directing the inventory of “all public and private school teachers aligned with ACT, unwelcome school and house visitations, and intrusive interrogations and surveillance by police personnel.”

NUPL helped ACT challenge these police programs before the Court of Appeals but was dismissed because of procedural “infirmities.” — Neil Jayson Servallos