For Immediate Release
May 1, 2016
Reference: Rhonda Ramiro, BAYAN USA, vc@bayanusa.org
On International Workers Day 2016, BAYAN USA members raise our fists and march with millions of working people around the world commemorating 130 years of workers and migrant struggles and resistance! The struggles of our sisters and brothers from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, who came to the U.S. in hopes for a better life, but were instead forced into the shadows and subjected to indignities of an inhumane system is a common story for all migrant workers. The need to link our common struggles in our homelands against U.S. imperialism and its neoliberal economic paradigm is ever more important.
As the U.S. imperialist wars of aggression and plunder of natural resources continue, more and more U.S. bases are being built in the Asia-Pacific, trampling on national sovereignty and causing violence upon peaceful communities. We can already see the impact of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) between the U.S. and Philippines, as more troops are being deployed to conduct “Balikatan” joint military exercises and enforce U.S.-modelled counter-insurgency programs such as Oplan Bayanihan. Propelling U.S. militarization are U.S. neoliberal economic policies, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, that operate to secure US economic hegemony and control over markets, resources, and local economies. Combine this with drive for cheap migrant labor via the Labor Export Policy (LEP), which exports at least 6,000 Filipinos from the Philippine every day.
We connect the struggles in semi-colonies like the Philippines where the Kidapawan farmers’ peaceful protest demanding the government to release food aid was violently dispersed by the bullets and truncheons of the police, to the struggles of workers and peasants around the world including the U.S., especially the farm workers fighting for fair wages and humane working conditions in the fields of California to Washington and campaigning to Boycott Driscoll. These are shining examples of working people who remain poor, landless, and suppressed, and yet continue to resist neoliberal economic policies, despite being met with intensifying and violent state repression.
In the face of imperialist war and occupation abroad, militarized attacks on black people all across the US, state repression of workers movements across the globe, and neoliberal economic policies that impoverish and displace working people everyday, BAYAN USA will continue building the anti-imperialist movement to challenge the structures that drive forced migration and reactionary violence, and more importantly, to win our peoples’ shared struggles for self-determination and genuine sustainable development.
Build the Militant Movement of Migrants & Workers!
Block the TPPA! Resist Neoliberalism!
Long Live International Solidarity!
Justice and Dignity for All Immigrants and Workers!
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BAYAN-USA is an alliance of 20 progressive Filipino organizations in the U.S. representing students, scholars, women, workers, artists, and youth. As the first and largest international chapter of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN-Philippines), BAYAN-USA serves as an information bureau for the national democratic movement of the Philippines and as a center for educating, organizing, and mobilizing anti-imperialist and progressive Filipinos in the U.S. For more information, visit www.bayanusa.org.