STATEMENT ON INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ DAY 2026
KARAPATAN Public Information
PRESS STATEMENT
01 May 2026
Reference: Cristina Palabay, KARAPATAN secretary general, 09173162831
KARAPATAN Public Information Desk, 09189790580
STATEMENT ON INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ DAY 2026
This year’s commemoration of International Workers’ Day comes at a time when the working people in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world are being buffeted both by intensifying fascist attacks and severe economic blows directly resulting from US imperialist aggression and intervention.
Two months prior, the US bombed Iran, prompting the latter’s defense through military strikes on US bases in West Asia and Africa. Since then, the US-instigated conflict has unleashed an economic storm that has sent the prices of fuel and other basic commodities on an upward spiral worldwide and caused unprecedented suffering to the working masses, including those in the Philippines.
Being the abject US puppet that he is, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has refused to rescind the regressive taxes on oil and other commodities and services, and repeal the Oil Deregulation Law, both of them imperialist impositions, preferring tangential measures that have had minimal effects on oil prices and provided little relief to the hard-up masses. The Marcos Jr. regime has shown contempt for the working people by refusing time and again to legislate a family living wage nationwide to enable them to cope with the rising costs of goods and services. Worse, it suppresses workers and peasants who wage organized actions to advance their interests.
On top of this, Marcos Jr. is slated to show even more obsequiousness to his imperialist master by hosting the biggest Balikatan war games ever, involving up to 17,000 military forces, 10,000 of whom are American soldiers. These war games have the avowed goal of enhancing inter-operability between the US military and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the event that the current conflict between the US and China over control of the Asia-Pacific escalates into an actual shooting war. Despite the hardships already inflicted on the Philippine working people by US imperialist economic impositions, the Marcos Jr. regime is prepared to go a step further by sacrificing the lives of ordinary Filipinos to serve the strategic hegemonist objectives of the US.
The intensifying fascist attacks by the Marcos Jr. regime against the struggling Filipino masses of workers and peasants are likewise meant to eliminate all forces preventing the AFP from completely focusing on serving as an adjunct of the US military against China.
Obliterating the armed resistance being waged by the New People’s Army (NPA) in the countryside as well as the latter’s perceived supporters both in the rural and urban areas is a US imperialist imperative to its puppet forces in the AFP. To achieve this, the US has provided up to $2.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing from 2026 to 2030 in addition to other security assistance packages. The US likewise provides doctrinal support for the Marcos Jr. regime’s counter-insurgency drives, including teaching ways by which the AFP could justify war crimes committed against civilians and hors de combat by distorting or outrightly violating principles of international humanitarian law. Accounts by the AFP of its latest atrocity in Toboso, Negros Occidental involving the massacre of 19 civilians and hors de combat NPA fighters are already replete with inconsistencies, exposing their lies and pointing to the perpetration by a Philippine puppet regime of one of the most horrific war crimes to date.
While it is the puppet regime’s military forces that pull the trigger, they do so emboldened by US military assistance and guided by US counter-insurgency doctrine. It is the US’ pursuit of global hegemony that is behind its support of tyrannical puppet regimes like that of Marcos Jr., and its wars of aggression and intervention against defiant states that have engendered unprecedented human suffering and the intensifying attacks against the hard-won economic, civil and political rights of the working people in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world.
The only way to resist these brutal and concerted attacks is for the working people in the Philippines and worldwide to forge ranks to expose and oppose imperialist aggression and intervention, and defeat tyrannical puppet regimes like that of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. that do the biddings of US imperialism.
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KARAPATAN is an alliance of human rights organizations and programs, human rights desks and committees of people’s organizations, and individual advocates committed to the defense and promotion of people’s rights and civil liberties. It monitors and documents cases of human rights violations, assists and defends victims and conducts education, training and campaign. It was established in 1995.