Picket lines and bread lines: The impossible choice

Here’s what the numbers will not tell us about the transport holiday in Iloilo City and province: the drivers who kept plying their routes were not crossing a picket line out of spite because they had not eaten yet.

The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board in Western Visayas confirmed as much, though not in those words. Atty. Ma. Joscet B. Abellar, the agency’s chief transportation development officer, said the strike was “not a total stoppage of operation but rather a reduction of the number of units operating.” She went further, admitting that some drivers may have continued operating “because of the exigency of the times.” That is bureaucratic lingo for a simple fact: a jeepney driver earning boundary on a day-to-day basis cannot afford to sit still when diesel is north of PHP 110 per liter.

And yet Bebot Villaniza did sit still. The Jaro-based driver stood behind a fuel price board at a gasoline station on March 24 to announce yet another people’s strike on March 26 — the third action in a week, after the two-day strike on March 19 and 20.

Villaniza and his fellow drivers are asking for things that sound radical only if you’ve never had to calculate whether you can afford to fill a tank: repeal the Oil Deregulation Law, remove the 12 percent VAT and excise taxes on fuel, and roll back prices immediately.

These are not new demands. Republic Act No. 8479, the Downstream Oil Industry Deregulation Act of 1998, has been under fire for nearly three decades. The law stripped the government of authority to control fuel prices, and Energy Secretary Sharon Garin herself has acknowledged this constraint, saying the Department of Energy does not have the power to cap prices without a legislative amendment or emergency powers. That admission came the same week President Marcos declared a state of national energy emergency through Executive Order No. 110, activating the UPLIFT response framework. But the emergency declaration, while sweeping on paper, still leaves the core demand untouched — Congress has not moved on repealing or even meaningfully amending RA 8479.

The thing that’s easy to miss about the Iloilo strike is that it actually worked. Not in the way strikes usually work — commuters weren’t stranded, the city didn’t grind to a halt. The provincial government’s Libreng Sakay vehicles were at Mohon, Ungka, and Tagbak terminals by 6 a.m. Face-to-face classes were canceled. Department of Education  (DepEd) and Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) regional offices shifted to work-from-home. Gov. Arthur Defensor Jr. convened the disaster risk cluster the same day and announced that the province would open dialogue with transport groups.

That last point is the real win, and Western Visayas Alliance of Transport Cooperatives and Corporations Inc (WVATCCI) Vice President Halley Alcarde seemed to know it. He called the strike “successful” even though it barely inconvenienced commuters, because the goal was never really about disruption — it was about being heard. Of the 1,782 franchise-awarded units in Iloilo, around 400 modernized jeepneys and 300 traditional units joined the action. That’s not overwhelming. But it was enough to move the conversation.

The trouble is, the conversation keeps happening at the wrong level. Defensor was honest enough to say the province has “no allocated budget for direct subsidies” and that there was “no firm commitment yet.” He urged the public to manage expectations. That’s fair as far as it goes — local governments aren’t equipped to absorb a national oil crisis. But it also means the real pressure has to be aimed at Manila, where the DOTr announced on March 24 that traditional jeepney operators will receive PHP 5,000 per unit and drivers PHP 1,500 each under a PHP 2.5 billion fuel subsidy program. For a driver burning through PHP 110-per-liter diesel across multiple trips a day, that PHP 1,500 might cover two or three days of operations. Then what?

That is the cruel math of the survival-versus-solidarity dilemma. A driver who agrees with every demand on the picket line but fires up the engine at dawn is not a strikebreaker. He is a man making an impossible calculation: lose today’s income to fight for a better tomorrow, or earn today and hope the system changes on its own. The fragmentation inside transport cooperatives — some units striking, others plying — is not organizational weakness. It’s the visible face of a workforce stretched so thin that even basic collective action becomes a luxury.

The national government’s response, to its credit, is moving. The fuel subsidy rollout is real. The excise tax suspension is on the table. Senators are now eyeing VAT reduction on petroleum products. But all of these are palliatives. The structural question remains: should the Philippine government have the power to intervene in fuel pricing during a crisis, or should it continue to watch from the sidelines as a 28-year-old deregulation law designed for a different era forces drivers to choose between picket lines and bread lines?

For Villaniza and the thousands of drivers like him, that question is not academic but the difference between standing behind a price board in protest and standing behind a steering wheel in silence.

Both cost something. One of them shouldn’t have to.