Mayday! May Day

May Day is Labor Day around the world save the United States. Associated with the aspirations of an international labor movement that asserts the rights of the working class, and historically supported by communist and socialist regimes, May Day has been an observance of the reality and continuing need for organized labor groups vis-à-vis managers of investment capital.

Mayday is a navigational distress signal

The economic float navigating the northwestern Pacific waters since the 1980s is floundering. The garment industry, a pole in the three-masted ship—which also numbers the visitors’ industry and government employment—is radically retrenching. The industry had lived off the cheap imported alien labor force that has staffed the production line of the garment factories. That is no longer a point of advantage. The economic ship keels on the overweight of excess labor force that generally does not wish to return to its market of origin. It also struggles with a bloated regulatory bureaucracy that has been buoyed by a revenue source in rapid and steep decline.

Mayday on May Day is an appropriate distress call

Nothing ends a conversation faster in social and business circles than the subject of labor force use in the CNMI. Exploitation of human resource uttered in its most objective nonjudgmental meaning, as in the exploitation (utilization) of natural resources, had gotten me into more strained conversations among acquaintances in the Saipan Chamber of Commerce than any other subject. Sensitive local residents tend to be apologetic in their guilt over living off the backs of employed aliens. Others are assertive of their prerogative to take advantage of the offerings of the free market economy where the investments go to where the least cost of production prevails.

Relegated to the slim picking of droppings at the economic table where a sumptuous feast had been the Commonwealth’s fare since its inception, it developed expensive habits up until 1997 when the well-stocked State galleys hit a rude Bhat snag. The chilling effect of the Bangkok awakening infected the Hanggul Won and stifled the Nippongo Yen. The CNMI dollar sneezed and the Chamolinian self-confidence ever since has had to meekly extend the mendicant bowl to the halls of congressional appropriation, military spending presence, and Uncle Sam’s other federally and thinly spread out largesse.

Look now at the make-up of our local labor force. There are the hotel chambermaids and the bonded servitude of the lowly and much maligned $200 per month live-in housemaid. Abounding are the $3.05 per hour professionals and the newly engaged Chinese farmers productively competing with former Filipino construction workers turned soil turners at an earlier time. Then, we have the Sub-Asian security guards turned family man to local resident ladies, who have cast their eyes on providing taxi services. We’ve had the Asian mom-and-pop stores, poker arcades, and Laundromats quietly establishing themselves in heavily populated neighborhoods.

Further, we now have the garment sewers turned Karaoke bar waiters and servers of other unofficially declared services. Add to these a government force that is most often indifferent to their public service provision functions, cavalierly casual in the enforcement of public order, yet passionately aggressive in strategically positioning themselves to benefit from the next reshuffling of elected and appointed public offices. The government as an employment agency operates not on the merits of self-conscious civil service tradition but on the honey and lard of extended family relations. This is not perceived as a matter of ethical conflict, nor of governance efficacy. It is merely following well-established lines of caring for one’s family loyalties, commitments and responsibilities. The archaic description of feudal management may be an appropriate description to the social scientist, but many would prefer the more acceptable cloak of practicing ‘island culture.’

Most recently, the organization of teachers as a labor force within the Public School System began to take some needed attention. “The issue is collective bargaining,” elected BOE teachers’ rep Ambrose Bennett declared before his assumption of office, and repeated many times over when attempts to establish a teachers’ negotiating panel was being made. The organizational effort had not been productive. Out of frustration, AB engaged the assistance of a not-too-genteel Guam Teachers Federation leadership to butt-kick a local teachers’ union in the CNMI. Already previously censured by his colleagues at the BOE ‘for style unbecoming,’ AB proceeded to alienate himself further by bewailing the limited academic qualifications of some of his peers on the board. Consequently, he’s lost the board’s ear, and perhaps, functionally though not officially, his seat. This is an election year so it is most unlikely that the governor will do anything about his appointee, unless a groundswell of teachers’ adverse opinions toward AB is broadly and loudly expressed. Unfettered and undaunted AB will undoubtedly continue to air his multifarious, eclectic and on occasion, indelicate views.

Reflecting on the fact that almost seven out of 10 of our finishing 6th Grade students are not reading at grade level, one would think that the teachers had bigger worries than AB’s perceived notion of his exclusion from BOE deliberations. Juan cannot read. Juanita, who phonetically can, is behind in comprehension. Students do easily mouth vision and mission statements, school philosophies and well-crafted literary expected school learning results, but comprehending what they mean, grounding them in their experience, relating learning to relevant setting is another matter all together. “Our children are schooled,” a mother said, “but they do not seem to be educated.” The same may be said of AB’s comments on academic qualifications of his peers. He mistook attainment in schooling as synonymous to accumulation wisdom. In this score, AB showed himself short on the latter.

Meanwhile, the skepticism over the viability of the ship of state to continue navigating efficaciously, given its present course towards fiscal upending, happily ignored at the helm, is not unfounded. Structurally pegged as a quadrant of Washington, D.C., more on the needy SE rather than the affluent NW sector at that, the matter of self-governance and self-determination remains a challenge that has not moved far since the issue got defined in the Covenant agreement more than two decades ago. We continue to be gracious recipients of the dole.

In both the public and private sectors, measures of efficiency often get emphasized before effectivity. Reporting on time gets a disproportionate attention to gauging actual output. The value of government employment precedes the efficient delivery of public services. Among some garment firms, the savings in wages paid, and in a couple of cases, unpaid, to a workforce hardly making living wages, unbeknown, or worst, ignored by oversight government bodies, does not a sane economy make.

Mayday on May Day. May a self-conscious and self-organizing labor force arise. The wind of change has been blowing wildly in our faces. It is time for each individual sans family loyalties and ethnic prejudices to take to the oars.