The Dignity of Human Work
Columban Mission
May-June 1996
PREDA (Prevent and Rehabilitate Drug Abusers) was founded 1974 in Olongapo,
Philippines, by Columban Father Shay Cullen, to combat the effects of drugs
on local teenagers. Since then, the PREDA Foundation had had to include jail
rescue, legal assistance, rights advocacy, therapy, AIDS education, shelter
and family reintegration among its many tasks. Problems consistent with the
conflicts that occurred when the U.S. Navy used Olongapo as its major Asian
harbor and recreational facility have been continually scrutinized by Fr.
Cullen. His solutions embarassed the U.S. Navy and the local Filipino
government; F.r Cullen continued to be a controversaial figure.
The PREDA factory was begun as an effort Tin self-reliance.
It had positive social impact but this was minimal considering the
other social problems it set out to solve.
As training went on for various applicants, troubled and out-of-school
youth included, the onsite factory grew.
Prior to 1983 PREDA sold its products to families stationed at the U.S.
Naval base in Olongapo. In
1983, we learned of the extent of the child sexual abuse, which extent was
hidden by the U.S. Navy. We
went public with this story and consequently lost all our customers.
We went broke.
By 1984, we had found new customers with the Alternative Trading Movement
that sells the products of small producer groups.
Our sales and manufacturing expanded.
By 1988 there were about 60 full-time workers at the PREDA site in a
separate building. By 1989 all
our products were for export to seven European countries and to the U.S. and
Canada.
In 1989-90, we decentralized our operations.
Some of our workers were falling into vice in the city, or neglecting
their families in the villages, and we were under increasing pressure from
local politicians. Space was
limited as our project expanded and our sales increased.
We set workers up in their own homes, some in the villages around Olongapo
City, others in far-off provinces.
We brought them motors and tools and gave interest-free capital and funds
for home improvement. As it
became a cottage industry, this brought the family together at-far less
expense. A worker had no costs for travel or accommodation and food
was home-cooked. Their growing
children learned skills and artistry from their parents.
After 1990, no manufacturing was done at the PREDA site in Olongapo.
These main facilities were used only for warehousing, finishing and
shipping. Luckily, that was
what saved the jobs of hundreds when Mt.Pinatubo erupted in 1991 and
destroyed our buildings and stock.
The products made in Olongapo, Zambale and Pangasinan are of small diameter
ratta and the leaves of the palm-like buri tree.
These are renewable raw materials, and we buy them from Aetas, the
tribal people who plant rattan in the forest and cultivate the buri tree.
We make small furniture items like nesting end-tables, stools and bookcases,
as well as small utilitarian items like magazine racks, wall cupboards,
picnic baskets, wine bottle racks, laundry baskets and similar household
items.
Besides raising public awareness on social issues and human rights and
providing services to the poor and oppressed, such as dru dependent street
children in dire circumstances, PREDA has provided employment and services
for as many as 240 people, and keeps them working for fair wages by
marketing their products.
The project is more than that, too, because human development and
education provide the opportunity for a life of dignity and well-being.
Marketing products for grassroots producer groups is only part of our story. Providing education on how to manage their own lives and
prevent themselves from being exploited and controlled by money lenders is
just as important. We learned
that providing work for just wages was not enough.
Some of the workers were easily led into vice and their money sometimes
failed to reach their hungry families.
Groups, like a mat-weavers' cooperative in Davao, or like a group in Cebu
who produce fashion accessories, necklaces, earrings, brooches, etc., made
from natural materials, have asked PREDA to help them with the design and
marketing of their products. It
provided designs and color schemes as well a finishing and marketing
services.
Most have grown and prospered.
PREDA earns a small margin that covers the costs of promotion and
information about the social conditions of the poor and the lives and work
of the producer groups. This
money eventually flows back to the producers in the form of education,
housing improvement loans and grants, interest-free production loans,
bonuses and other benefits.
In the PREDA compound at Olongapo, the large warehouse that was destroyed by
Mt.
Pinatubo's eruption in 1991 was rebuilt on the site of the former
workshop. Here all the finished
products from all groups are d@livered and stored.
A PREDA truck goes to villages to collect the finished items and
delivers raw materials ordered by the producers and purchased for them at
lower prices by PREDA. Products
from faraway places are shipped in various ways to our warehouse.
Here, also, thousands of these items are inspected for quality and if
necessary, improved and touched up.
Items are clipped, brushed and varnished, hand-polished, finished, coded and
packaged for export.
The finishing department is the place where people are trained and employed. Former barwomen work here.
And streetboys over 16 can continue to go to school while they also
work at part-time jobs. We
employ abandoned Amerasian boys as well as the parents of street children
who have rehabilitated themselves and have trained for a job here.
The parents have reconciled with their children, who have been cared
for in the child-care program.
In this way the handicraft industry is integrated into other projects,
providing valuable opportunities to help the poorest of the poor.
Juanito
We had shipped a valuable container of goods just before the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. Within
days of the calamity, we were salvaging what we could from the devastation.
We lost about $20,000 worth of goods that were in our warehouse.
Furniture, files and personal belongings were lost when tons of ash and
sand caved in the roof. The
typhoon that was raging poured water onto everything.
After we had cleaned the driveway of ash and sand, we were able to get
our truck to Manila to deliver to a warehouse there and continue shipping to
our customers.
We brought back relief supplies to Olongapo, and together with the church
relief groups, we distributed supplies to hundreds of people affected by the
eruption. Fortunately we still
bad a small building on the hillside that had a very strong roof and had
survived, and also a smaller warehouse that was quickly repaired.
We continue our operations in the cramped warehouse.
What does all this mean for an individual?
I know of no better example that Juanito.
Juanito de la Pefia was a poor, hard-working Filipino who lived in a bamboo
and grass house on the hillside of Olongapo City.
His children played outside the fence of the U.S. Naval Base at Subic Bay.
As a basketmaker, he earned just enough for the bare necessities of
life. But now, his life is
changed.
The problem with the military bases was that they swallowed up vast amounts
of natural resources and created wealth for a few elite Filipino families
who had contracts with the military, or who owned clubs and bars that
trafficked in women and children.
Juanito could not get a job on the base.
Even a minimal amount of the resources of his own country had not provided
him with a decent education or the health to enable him to meet the
employment standards.
In his trade, Juanito used the raw materials growing in the forest around
him to make baskets. The rattan
grew back again and his basketmaking was sustainable.
Juanito took his baskets down the mountain and stood on the side of the
road, selling them to the tourists from the base and Manila.
The people who could afford his beautiful baskets would not pay a decent
price for them. They haggled
and browbeat Juanito, saying they could buy baskets cheaper elsewhere.
Wealthy as they were, they wanted everything as cheap as possible.
They took advantage of his lack of education, his innate docility and
the submissiveness that came from hunger.
"My children couldn't eat the baskets," he said.
"I had to sell them for whatever they gave me even though I knew they
were worth more. It's good we
planted vegetables and raised some chickens and had a mango tree, otherwise
we would have starved."
His purchasers did not value the skill and the time-consuming labor that
went into the gathering and preparation of the raw material for the baskets,
or of the skill of weaving and shaping them into a symmetrical and pleasing
form. They did not see the artistic value of his unique hand-made
product. The same people,
without thinking, would pay five times as much for a machine-stamped plastic
basin.
This inconsiderate attitude reflects the institutionalized injustice that
pervades society today, when the ruling class is without concern or
compassion.
From a position of wealth, people can oppress the poor, drive them from the
land into slums and out onto the streets, where their children become
beggars and child prostitutes for degenerate locals and foreigners.
That was what was happening to Juanito's family.
His eldest daughter, 15, was applying for work in a nightclub, the only
"industry" in Olongapo, the day Juanito came to PREDA to ask me to come to
his house and see his baskets.
I went gladly and was impressed.
Soon Juanito was making hundreds of baskets for PREDA’s customers, for which
he earned a lot more. His
brothers and a cousin were quickly employed.
Then Juanito began to teach his trade to some equally poor neighbors.
Immediately his family and neighbors were eating better; the children,
including his eldest, began attending school every day.
They cast off their threadbare T-shirts for new, brightly colored
blouses.
Pride and dignity came back to his family, and Juanito, who had started to
drink, was sober, alert and busy improving his house.
From his and his brothers' savings and a grant from PREDA, he built a
solid concrete house, impervious to typhoons and floods.
It has a common storage area for the raw materials and for his
neighbors' finished baskets.
They too, are doing much better.
Fr.
Shay Cullen was first appointed to the Philippines in 1969.
