(...the labour of man sustains family, home and motherland...)"
-Jose Rizal, Himno al Trabajo (Hymn to Labor)
The labor force of a country is one of its primary assets, as labor plays a major role in the production of goods and services for both local and international use, which is important to the stability and growth of its economy. This is especially true of the Philippines, which has a labor force of over 57 million out of its total population of 88 million people. Of these, over 11 million are employed abroad and remit more than 13 billion pesos yearly, making a major contribution to the country's economy. Yet, the history of labor in the Philippines has been a long and unhappy one. In the past, Filipinos were peons under the hacienda system, subject to the whims of hacienda owners, usually under harsh economic measures that kept them from attaining financial independence. With the dissolution of this system came employment in factories and corporations, and the evolution of labor and social legislation. Even then, Filipino workers had to struggle long and hard for their rights and benefits, a struggle that helped to shape Philippine labor law and policies as they are today. Knowledge about labor and labor studies is therefore essential, not only for the economic growth of the country, but also for the development of an informed, knowledgeable labor force and enlightened employers, working towards achieving an equitable balance between the needs of the workers and the requirements of industry.
Filipiniana.net, in partnership with the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and in cooperation with the Institute for Labor Studies, launches the Philippine Labor Studies microsite, a project that aims to be the most comprehensive repository of all information related to Philippine labor studies and Filipino migrant workers. The Institute for Labor Studies, the policy research and advisory arm of DOLE, provided the initial content of the website by giving Filipiniana.net access to its publications, including several volumes of the Philippine Labor Review which, according to Rene E. Ofreneo, was published as "an attempt to fulfill a long-felt need in the country for a forum for analyzing, expounding and ventilating important policies, studies, researches, issues and problems related to labor."
While a number of websites devote themselves to publishing laws related to labor, Philippine Labor Studies aspires to be the premier online portal focusing not only on labor and social legislation laws, but also on research publications in these fields, thus making the website a repository of both primary and secondary sources on labor studies.
Philippine Labor Studies will contain full text versions of the Labor Code and related laws, along with several publications from the Institute for Labor Studies, labor resource directory, researches, and monographs. The collection will be made available on the Internet for everyone to access twenty-four hours a day for free. Executive summaries and abstracts, keywords, and subject headings accompany each document to help users find the content they need easily.
We hope that Filipino employees and employers, labor students, labor organizations, labor law practitioners, businessmen and, in general, persons dealing with labor and labor studies will find Philippine Labor Studies helpful in their scholarly endeavors to know more about and to contribute to the growing amount of materials on Labor Studies in the Philippines.
Philippine Labor Studies website is dedicated to all the Filipino workers, both within the country and abroad, on whose backs and shoulders, hearts and minds, rest the fate of our nation.
Featured Item
"it is necessary to further protect the level of real wages from the ravage of worldwide inflation."
-- Ferdinand E. Marcos,
P.D. No. 851: 13th Month pay Law.
