Dwindling Unions or Dwindling CPP Influence?

The decline in active government workers’ unions was among the concerns raised at the Regional Workers’ Congress–Mindanao Cluster Davao Leg, held in Davao City on October 5. The gathering brought together government workers and labor representatives to discuss workplace concerns, reconnect inactive unions, and strengthen collective advocacy.

Jean Orsolino, international affairs officer of the Confederation for Unity, Recognition and Advancement of Government Employees (COURAGE), attributed the trend partly to “red-tagging,” state policies, and the tendency to associate unions with progressive politics. But that explanation leaves another question open: Is public-sector unionism itself declining, or is the CPP’s influence within government-worker organizing also waning?

For decades, organizations like COURAGE, alongside their allies in Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) and various sectoral fronts, have operated under a familiar and deceptive script. They present themselves as champions of public-sector employees, using legitimate grievances over salaries, benefits, and job security as a Trojan horse. Beneath the rhetoric of labor rights, however, lies a systematic strategy: weaponizing government workers, infiltrating vital state institutions, and building an urban mass base designed to feed the underground communist movement led by the CPP-NPA-NDF.

Instead, they serve an ideological agenda dictated by the underground. Public servants want genuine institutional reforms, better dialogue, and lawful, constructive solutions to workplace challenges—not revolutionary posturing that seeks to undermine the very government they swore to serve.

Furthermore, using legitimate employment issues, such as the status of contractual or job-order (JO) workers, to fuel anti-state agitation exposes their true motive. Contractualization in the government is an administrative and budgetary challenge that requires serious, lawful, and systemic governance reforms, not militant street theater or revolutionary indoctrination disguised as union organizing.

Workers’ rights to organize, petition, and advocate for their welfare are constitutionally protected and vital to public service. But there is a wide, unbridgeable chasm between genuine labor advocacy and subversion. When front organizations like COURAGE use union platforms to shield CPP agendas and discredit lawful state institutions, they betray the very civil servants they claim to represent.

Public servants are not cannon fodder for a failed communist revolution. The decline in CPP-aligned radical influence within public-sector unions is not a crisis of democracy. It is a sign that Filipino government workers are finally drawing the line between genuine public service and underground manipulation.