On one dock in a port in the Philippines, workers trying to get a living wage have been stymied by their employers' decision to use children, boys aged 10 to 17. Although this is clearly illegal, the government has refused to move because it wants to attract global investors with cheap labor. PNS editor David Bacon writes about the winners and losers in the new global economy.

DAPITAN, PHILIPPINES -- How do you break a dock workers union in the Philippines?

With children.

At least, that's how a union was stopped last year here in this port city on the southern island of Mindanao.

Six years ago, the 80 longshoremen working for the Dipolog and Dapitan Stevedoring and Warehousing Services Company voted to have the Philippine Integrated Industrial Labor Union (PIILU) represent them. The union, an affiliate of the conservative Trade Union Congress, signed a five-year contract that pegged longshore wages to the minimum wage in Mindanao for dock workers -- about 96 pesos a day. (The peso has been in free fall in recent weeks, as of mid-January, it was worth about 2.5 cents.)

In late 1995, a year before the agreement was due to expire, the "capataz," or dock foreman, began to work behind the scenes to organize a company-based union that could challenge the PIILU's right to represent the employees.

But that wasn't the biggest threat to the established union.

Children started showing up on the Dapitan wharf. At first there were just a handful working full-time, but the number quickly grew. Flor Amistoso, a PIILU organizer, says she has interviewed 71 children working there.

The Philippine government estimates that it takes over 370 pesos a day to support a family of six, so dockers never earned enough to support a family. Once in a while, dock workers in Dapitan would bring their own kids to work with them, but only to do light jobs. The new wave of child workers who arrived when the company union got started began doing the work of adults.

Their main job is unloading heavy sacks of concrete. When a freighter carrying cement docks at the wharf, children troop up the gangway, and down into the ship's hold. Each child hoists a sack onto his shoulders, and carries it up out of the boat and onto the pier. There two adults take it and stack it onto a pallet or truck. The children work until the hold is empty.

They are all boys, from 10 to 17 years old. For this heavy labor, they receive 80 centavos a sack. In a week, each earns between 70 and 200 pesos.

The capataz says he hires children because adults won't do the work. But Flor Amistoso points out that "slowly but surely, they are replacing adults by hiring children. If we allow children to do the work," she warns, "the whole union is weakened."

With a grant from the International Labor Organization's International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor, Amistoso has been working to organize the children and their families. She has befriended the kids, taking them fishing and on picnics, buying them a volleyball net for games between unloading boats. In classes under a tree near the docks she began teaching them to read. She visited their parents, who live in squatter communities without running water or electricity near the port, in houses built of cast-off materials.

The work exacts a heavy physical toll. The boys complain of muscle pains, headache, fever, and respiratory ailments. Three have tuberculosis, and one has started to cough up blood. Last year a child was killed when he fell inside a ship.

But despite the pain and danger, the kids want to work -- and their families have begun to depend on the income. "Their fathers ask me, 'Can you give us three square meals a day?"' Amistoso recounts. "I just tell them I'm not here to give them money or food, but to tell them what their rights are."

The Philippine labor code prohibits the labor of all children under 16. (Those aged 16 to 18 can only work directly under their parents' supervision.) Yet the local office of the Philippine government's Department of Labor and Employment has not moved to stop the child labor in Dapitan port. Pressed by the International Monetary Fund's demand to make the country's economy attractive to investors, enforcement of labor protection legislation, including the prohibition of child labor, has decreased. 

The government boasts the country's inexpensive labor force as an important competitive advantage in the world economy. The PILU is virtually paralyzed, unable to confront child "scabs."

"I think the only way we can stop the children working is if the port workers themselves take some action, like going on strike," Amistoso concludes. "They're afraid that if they act, they will be fired and replaced, and the government won't defend them. But if we don't act, we'll never be able to protect the jobs of the adults. And what kind of life will we be giving to our own children?"