Vultures

GSIS chief Winston Garcia must have been surprised last week when an uninvited contingent from the Maoist group Courage materialized during a dialogue organized with the Philippine Government Employees Association (PGEA).

The radicals, composed mostly of unionists brought in from all over, were in their usual form as they tried to barge into the serene dialogue. They waved red banners, chanted obscene slogans and freely slandered the management of the public pension fund that has, to its misfortune, fallen under unwarranted controversy.

It was controversy fueled largely by misunderstanding about the means and methods of the administrative reform process undertaken by the present management of the public sector pension fund.

Courage is the public sector counterpart of the notorious Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU). They look and talk the same. They employ the same tactics. They subsume union matters to ideological and political dictate.

When the KMU nests in an enterprise, that company is doomed. Its credit risk rises. Its production projections become untenable.

Strikes will be called at the slightest excuse. Demands will be raised to impossible levels to make negotiations futile. When the political goals of the CPP-NPA require it, the radical unionists are called out for political strikes called "welgang bayan."

Many enterprises have fallen victim to the KMU’s highly ideological brand of "militant" unionism. As a consequence, tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.

But in the worldview of Maoist unionism, the more miserable the working class, the better. The more workers become unemployed, the angrier they will be and the more likely they will join the "revolution."

It is a destructive attitude, one that derives from the cataclysmic version of political change native to Maoism.

But it is also a self-limiting strategy. The more enterprises go bankrupt due to irresponsible union actions, the less unionists the KMU ends up with.

As a result of diminishing bases in private industries, radical activists have stepped up organizing and agitation activities in public enterprises. Because of their public nature, it is unlikely that government will allow these enterprises to keel over no matter how much radical union activity escalates beyond the bounds of social responsibility.

The public enterprises have thus been targeted as a strategic playground for the radical unionists. Here they can conduct high-profile protest activities and score political points. It is a rich harvesting field for political mobilization and a suitable staging ground for exerting pressure on any government in place.

We have it from intelligence analysts that a whole sub-theory of revolution has been evolved by the cadres who specialize on organizing in public enterprises. The radical unions can perform key roles in paralyzing government functions when the moment for a communist insurrection materializes.

That is a self-serving sub-theory. It helps justifies the resources channeled by the leftist movement to public sector organizing activities and raises the importance of the public sector cadres in the Maoist scheme of things.

As their counterparts in the KMU do, Courage organizers pick out populist issues, inflate their importance and project them to the wider public through hysterical protest activities. It does not matter if these protest activities are disproportional to the importance of the issues at hand or if the populist issues taken undermine reform initiatives that would benefit the people eventually.

In fact, it does not matter if the positions taken by the radical unionists are intellectually bankrupt or totally reactionary. In the Maoist view, it is the noise that is important. The CPP-NDF is in the business of maintaining constant agitation from which cadres are harvested for "higher forms of struggle." The fracas is the end in itself.

We first saw the extent of Maoist public sector organizing early in 2001 when Courage seized the opportunity of friction between the insiders at the SSS and the reformist leadership of Vitaliano Nanagas. Courage activists moved quickly, organized protest activities within the SSS, brought the protests to a crescendo and eventually forced Nanagas to quit his post.

It does not matter that the reforms initiated by Nanagas were valid and that those reforms were continued by his successor. What was important for the Maoist unionists was the opportunity to grandstand and indulge in political narcissism.

The "success" in the Nanagas affair at the SSS became a model for Courage activists nestled in other public enterprises.

The Courage-controlled union at the National Food Authority stood against the reform of the subsidy-hungry agency. Eventually, NFA administrator Anthony Abad had to relinquish his post to a lower-profile reformer.

The Courage-controlled union at the Bureau of Internal Revenue conducted protest activities against the modernization of that vital agency. They allied themselves with the syndicates and protected the status quo by opposing the re-invention of our revenue administration. Eventually, BIR Commissioner Rene Banez had to offer his resignation in the face of concerted effort by powerful insiders to undermine collection and aggravate the fiscal deficit.

Poor Winston Garcia. He is now the target of opportunity of Courage agitators who are trying very hard to fuel the controversy in his agency even as the more reasonable PGEA has already taken a more understanding and more conciliatory position.

It does not matter that the GSIS employees union is not Courage-controlled. The radical agitators gather around like vultures when the scent of controversy emanates.

As we saw in that ugly scene last week, they barged into the dialogue with PGEA from the outside. They clashed with security guards to break into the auditorium. They tried their best to precipitate a violent confrontation.

The pattern is clear. Courage will try and break into any government agency where a constituency appears available for radical organizers. They will opportunistically take any position on any issue, escalate whatever minor controversy there might be in the agency in order to achieve political and ideological goals.

Courage is a plague for all reformers who run into conflicts with entrenched interests within public institutions. Because of their opportunism, Courage organizers will ally with the enemies of bureaucratic reform because that is the means to generate a mass base for their "revolution."

It is now Winston Garcia’s turn to deal with this highly ideological plague.