MANILA – Mostly foreign-owned companies located inside the export processing zones in Southern Luzon have started feeling the pinch of the global financial turmoil by retrenching their workers, a big labor group reported.
In Laguna province alone, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) said it received information that about 35,000 workers were either laid off or had their work hours reduced due to the crisis.
Most of those affected worked for companies, mostly engaged in electronics and automotive parts, whose export markets have collapsed, forcing them to reduce their workforce or lessen their work hours, said former senator Ernesto Herrera, the secretary general of the TUCP, the country’s biggest labor organization.
“I was informed that large exporters located at the 387-hectare Laguna Technopark in the towns of Binan and Sta. Rosa have laid off some 33,000 personnel,” Herrera said. “The rest of the firms have resorted to extremely aggressive cuts in work hours.”
He disclosed a Japanese investor, whom he did not identify but who conducts business with Japanese firms located at the Laguna ecozone relayed the information to him.
Herrera made the revelation as Intel Corporation, the world’s largest maker of microprocessors, announced it will shut down this year its assembly test facility in Cavite province also in Southern Luzon.
Intel, which has been operating in Cavite for the past 35 years, has about 1,800 workers, according to company officials.
Laguna and Cavite compose the so-called Calabarzon Area in Southern Luzon, along with the provinces of Batangas, Rizal and Quezon which play host to exports processing or ecozones where companies, mostly foreign-owned and export-oriented, have set up shop due to incentives, like tax holidays, offered by the government.
As a result, Calabarzon has become one of the fastest-growing and prosperous regions in the Philippines.
An Intel official said the plan to close the Cavite plant, which manufactures Flash memory, microprocessors and chip sets, is part of efforts to restructure its manufacturing and operations worldwide.
But the official assured the laid-off employees will be offered a severance package and various transition services, which he did not, however, clarify.
The official also revealed Intel plans to close two assembly test facilities in Penang, Malaysia as well as halt production at its wafer fabrication facilities in Hillsboro, Oregon and in Santa Clara, California in the US.
Earlier, another US electronics company, Texas Instruments, announced that it had laid off 392 of its workers at its plant in Baguio City in the Northern Luzon highlands because of low export demand for its products.
Meanwhile, TUCP’s Herrera revealed that the 94 firms located at the Laguna Technopark had reported a total workforce of 80,000 in 2008.
Herrera implied that due to the crisis, these companies might have already lost more than 40 percent of workers, adding that in just one large Japanese firm, full-time employees were told to report for work for only seven days for the whole of January.
He urged the Department of Labor and Employment to check the reports and immediately take the appropriate safety nets for the displaced workers.
At the same time, Herrera cited a recent report from the National Statistics Office which said that Philippine exports fell 11.9 percent to $3.49 billion in November 2008, which marked the second straight month of double-digit decline after contracting by 14.5 percent in October.
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[...] of the country’s biggest electronics manufacturers, formally bade goodbye after announcing it is closing down its facility in Cavite province in Southern Luzon where it has operated for the past 35 years, due to hard [...]