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I REMEMBER a similar case a couple of years ago. A
group of overseas Filipino workers in Hong Kong protested the "Probe Team"
television program presumably because it was hurting the image of the
Philippines abroad. The program was being aired in Hong Kong through cable
TV and its stories about the mountain of garbage in the Payatas area of
Quezon City, pedophilia in Pagsanjan town, south of Manila, and cases of
incest in various parts of the country, and child prostitutes, among other
things, were making the country look like a God-forsaken place. The
stories had no small amount of impact on Filipinos in Hong Kong, the group
said. They stood to reap a harvest of scorn and ridicule. They wanted the
Probe Team to mend its ways or the cable TV station to stop airing it,
whichever came first.
I said then the group's demands were unreasonable. To begin with, the
media are not in the business of trying to make the country look good;
that is the business of the tourism department. Or the PR industry. The
business of the media is to tell the truth as best they can. Secondly, a
country sells itself abroad not by inventing a good image of itself, but
by doing good things. Reality, and not advertisement, is still the best
advertiser of a country. You do not have a mountain of garbage burying
people in a landslide, rampant pedophilia and incest, and a growing tribe
of child prostitutes, you will not look God-forsaken. You keep silent
about them, you will still look God-forsaken.
And finally, I said, rather than giving a bad image of the country, the
Probe Team in fact gave good image of it by showing that it still had a
free press. You can't have a better advertisement of a democracy than
that.
That is my exact same answer to Donald Dee.
Dee is the president of the Confederation of Garment Exporters of the
Philippines. He is pissed off at the Inquirer because the Inquirer exposed
the shenanigans of a company called Anvil Ensembles. They included giving
workers a drug that kept them awake for days so they could sew enough baby
clothes to meet the demands of a foreign buyer. The workers complained of
the treatment and their case is now with the Department of Labor.
Dee doesn't like what the Inquirer has done. Even if true, he says, Anvil
is an isolated case. The garments industry in general treats its workers
fairly. Anvil is just a very small fish in a very large pond, and to
suggest that it represents the whole pond is iniquitous. "The media should
remember that our major customers abroad could pick up the story, and this
could make them drop their orders. That is why I am reacting this way. Can
you imagine the economic impact and dislocation you have caused just
because of this one small company?"
His complaint is unreasonable, of course.
First off, you have to ask what the Confederation of Garments Exporters is
doing to cleanse its ranks of scalawags. Dee is right when he says news
about a small company like Anvil treating its workers like chattel slaves
could ruin the industry. The solution is not to prevent media from
reporting it, the solution is to stop it. The confederation may not have
police powers but it can always compel wayward owners to toe the line on
pain of being reported to labor department or the police. The principle
remains: What gives something a good press is truth, not advertisement. Or
worse, silence.
The labor unions of course have an entirely different view of the state of
the garments industry. Which is that Anvil's case is by no means the
exception, it is the rule. Or if it is an exception, it is only in degree.
Other companies may not resort to keeping their workers awake by drugs,
but they exploit them just as ruthlessly. By paying less than the minimum,
by not paying overtime, by not providing safe working conditions. That
charge is not easily dispelled by assurances that the confederation will
investigate it.
It is not the business of the Inquirer to make the economic picture of the
country look good. That is the business of business. Even if Anvil's case
were not representative of the general case, it has to be reported by the
fact of its being there. The case of Acsa Ramirez, the whistleblower in a
tax scam, is also an exception. The President does not make the mistake
every day of pointing out the whistleblower in public as the culprit.
Bishop Teodoro Bacani's case is probably also an exception, though some
people might argue his case is far more common than we think. It is not
every day that someone files a case against a bishop for sexual
harassment.
The stakes in both cases are high. The first stands to ruin the
credibility of the president, the second to subvert the moral standing of
the Catholic Church. As impact goes, it is at least comparable to the one
Dee fears, if not more. That is not a reason for Ramirez or the
complainant in Bacani's case to bite their tongues and slink away.
Certainly, that is not a reason for the Inquirer or any other newspaper to
keep its silence and look the other way. That is a matter of fundamental
justice. And matters of fundamental justice may not be held hostage to
such things as the honor of the presidency or the moral standing of the
Catholic Church.
Nor, indeed, the good image of garments exporters. If foreign buyers stop
buying garments from us a result of this -- though highly unlikely, the
post-Seattle activists have been trying to blacklist US corporations that
import stuff from Third World companies that employ child and conscripted
labor, to no great avail -- that won't be the fault of the Inquirer or the
workers who refuse to be turned into drug-crazed zombies. That will be the
fault of Anvil, and the confederation that governs it.
Rather than ruining the image of the country, the Inquirer's story on
Anvil stands to improve it. It shows there's still a great deal of freedom
in it. |
