The Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law and the Asian Law Centre were pleased to host a seminar on Blas Ople and authoritarian labour regulation in the Philippines, presented by Dr Petra Mahy (Melbourne Law School) and Dr Trang Thi Kieu Tran (Deakin University), with Professor Sean Cooney (Melbourne Law School).
Blas Ople (19272003) was a key figure in the authoritarian regime of President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines. He was either Secretary or Minister of Labour almost continuously from 1967 through to the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986. While a strong supporter of Marcos, Ople was a complex and contradictory figure as a “leftist-nationalist” who nonetheless supported restricted collective labour rights. In particular, Ople was instrumental in the formulation of the Labour Code of 1974 which, although much amended, is still the principal labour law in the present-day Philippines. The Labour Code, enacted two years after Marcos declared martial law, amalgamated existing, largely US-influenced, laws. While existing individual labour rights largely lived on in the Code, collective labour relations were significantly restricted in line with the martial law regime. The Code also aimed to drive national socio-economic development. This seminar explored Blas Ople’s own writings and speeches and other historical evidence to trace his personal...
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