Joan M Salvador (Joms)

Joms Salvador is the Secretary General of GABRIELA Philippines, the biggest and broadest women’s organisation in the Philippines that has for nearly four decades worked on women’s rights and welfare. She started her involvement with GABRIELA in 1998 as a member and later National Chairperson of GABRIELA-Youth and has since been active in the women’s movement, working with grassroots urban and rural communities in the Philippines. She also holds leading roles in regional and global women and people’s organisations, including being part of APWLD.

APWLD interviewed Joms in December 2020 and below is her story.

Becoming a feminist and women human rights defender

Growing up, I was very interested in critical feminist theory. Despite this, I still felt limited in my ability to act on my political beliefs or be part of a larger movement that would contribute to social change until I became involved in the women’s movement with Gabriela Youth, one of the most prominent women’s groups in the Philippines. After graduating, I continued to be involved with Gabriela Youth and became national chairperson in 2003, deputy secretary-general in 2009 and secretary-general in 2012.

In 1998, as a new member of Gabriela Youth, I participated in a peasant integration programme to learn about how women are oppressed and burdened. Legally, women can own agricultural land, but in reality, agricultural lands, especially those held by small farmer tenants, are family-owned. Women are most considered adjuncts in the family structure. I learned that, on average, women agricultural workers earned only one-tenth of their male counterparts for the same work hours.

It was Gabriela that exposed me to the realities of Philippine society. Their analysis and position on the intersections of class and gender are clear: that women belonging to particular classes are doubly oppressed. There is a need for a distinct women’s movement to assert women’s rights and their situation’s betterment.

There have been efforts in the legal recognition of women’s rights in the Philippines. I think the Philippines was the first country to have a law on domestic violence in the whole Asia-Pacific. Also, the Philippine government ratified CEDAW (Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women) many years ago. In 2010, the Philippines finally had its national enabling law for CEDAW, the Magna Carta of Women. Gabriela and other women’s organisations fought for it for years.

However, with the Duterte regime’s macho-fascist stance, women’s and people’s movements are still met with state repression and vilification. Together with other Gabriela leaders, members, and human rights defenders in the Philippines, I have been the target of attacks, harassment, and trumped-up charges by the Philippine government.

Growing together with APWLD

In 2005, I first met APWLD members at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference protests in Hong Kong. I was part of the Philippine delegation representing Gabriela Youth in several people’s activities and conferences parallel to the WTO Ministerial Meeting. Coming full circle, I am now an Organising Committee (OC) member of Women Interrogating Trade & Corporate Hegemony (WITCH), the trade programme of APWLD. 

But years ago, I was a member of Grounding the Global (GG) regional OC. Before that was formed in 2013, APWLD was involved in the regional movement and civil society organisation processes concerning the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN had a lot on its plate, with talks of building an ASEAN economic community, a free trade zone, and strengthening human rights mechanisms. So APWLD, together with International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP), co-coordinated and co-organised a conference of Southeast Asian women’s organisations in 2011. As a result of this conference, the Southeast Asian Women’s Caucus was formed. I got to be part of the regional coordinating body as the Philippines’ focal person.

The Pacific Island Forum and South Asian People’s Forum were also available to enhance the regional work of APWLD and analyse emerging trade issues. WTO negotiations had begun collapsing and global imperialist powers were looking into sub-regionalising or regionalising trade agreements. So, the APWLD GG regional programme was formed, and I started a particular journey of building a Southeast Asian women’s movement.

I remember in those three years with GG regional POC, we had five programme officers. The POC did not have a mechanism to keep growing due to the lack of a dedicated programme officer, and I believe the GG regional strategic plan fell flat. After merging the GG regional and the GG international in 2016, APWLD noted the need to take on a more active role in advocacy around trade and corporate hegemony. A new WITCH POC was initiated, which Gabriela also became part of.

Trade works are interconnected with how the neoliberal globalisation process impacts women’s lives. We feel and bear the disproportionate impacts of neoliberalism, but this is not obvious and not widely discussed. To tackle this challenge, the WITCH programme must break down the problem of trade and tie it to core-economic relationships between and among nations, governments, corporations, and people, as well as lay the groundwork for all other aspects of social interaction. It is not easy. When you break it down, it always appears states are protecting corporate interests over people’s interests, and this is why we assert our rights. Our people are also supposed to be represented by governments. We always have to remember the principle: when states talk about trade or corporations negotiate trade policies with states, it always connects to people’s lives and people’s interests. The public has to know. States have to be transparent to the people.

The WITCH programme compliments APWLD’s work. As a women’s movement, we must pay attention to economic relations between and amongst states. Political power is used to protect economic interests. It is not only about trade but also redounds to war and militarism. 

There is a need for concerted and coordinated efforts across movements to engage players during negotiations at the regional and global levels. But because the basic unit for these negotiations will always be the state, we need to strengthen national movements and national level advocacy. 

South Korean farmers, for example, had a strong campaign against the WTO. In the Philippines, the peasant movement, the health sector movement, among others, had active campaigns against the WTO leading to its failure. Struggles at the national level, amplified by regional networks and global movements broke the negotiations down. 

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was signed roughly in November 2020. The pandemic and the global recession are push factors for that. National-level campaigns haven’t been so strong. States learned from the WTO experience, and they became much more secretive. We need to know what has changed and what tactics and strategies we should take.

Trade and economic crises have always been at the core of Gabriela‘s work. But it is through APWLD that we can, for example, engage the RCEP and WTO, build and enhance our knowledge of trade agreements and platforms, and the status of negotiations of particular trade agreements. As a national organisation, Gabriela can reassess and analyse the situation and configure new and complementary ways of organising women amid this pandemic. However, APWLD presents a global perspective on how women around the world are affected.

In solidarity with Filipino WHRDs

We have seen even worse situations since Duterte came to power, with some of our colleagues and friends arrested on trumped-up charges, killed extrajudicially, or disappeared. The human rights situation is getting worse. 

We are very thankful and appreciative of the work that organisations like APWLD have done for the Philippine movement, especially with the Philippines’ human rights defenders. APWLD has consistently been one of the regional or global organisations that have been quick to issue solidarity statements and launch solidarity actions whenever there are cases of political harassment or threats to the lives and security of human rights defenders in the Philippines. 

When there was a mass arrest of 20 LGBTQ+ advocates/Gabriela members in June 2020, we were very thankful that APWLD, on the same day of the arrest, launched a solidarity action, issued statements, and alerted our membership, the COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding. We need to constantly update and let the international society know how easy it is for our government to stifle us.

Involvement with APWLD’s governance and ways moving forward

Gabriela participates in APWLD’s Regional Council (ReC) and Programme and Management (P&M) and has strategic plans to contribute experiences like critical analysis, strategy, and tactics from the Philippine women’s movement to movement-building in the region and globally. Gabriela is also part of the global One Billion Rising movement, the International Women’s Alliance, and the Asian Rural Women’s Coalition, among others.

There is no other women’s organisation in Asia and the Pacific that can approximate the size and reach of APWLD. As a member of APWLD, we are working with the biggest and strongest regional women’s organisation. 

There are several points on APWLD’s analysis and membership.

One, APWLD has a progressive framework and analysis, encapsulated by GFMP analysis. But globalisation, fundamentalisms, militarism and patriarchy are not static concepts and situations. There is always a need to reassess, re-evaluate, and re-analyse situations. For example, how does China figure as a growing superpower in competing with the US and Europe? How do we view that? We try to analyse China’s role and try to analyse the growing and changing situation, especially in the region.

Second, we must recognise that APWLD’s strength lies in its membership. We have a growing secretariat and staff from across the region who have their own experiences, insights, and expertise to share with the organisation. But we shouldn’t forget that our core strength lies in our membership. No other women’s regional organisation is like APWLD in that sense. We should look into drawing more participation, breadth of experience, and expertise of our members from various national organisations across the region into the work of APWLD.

We can always consider new forms of engaging and evolving our membership because that’s our core treasure as a regional organisation. There is a limitation to the Programme Organising Committee structure because we have a limited number of members who can be part of OCs. 

It is always a challenge for feminist movements to tap the youth. Young feminists have a significant presence online, and APWLD needs to recognise that and build an online strategy to reach them. Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) is trying to tap young feminist researchers, but that may not be enough, so we need to make online communication more engaging for the youth and always be conscious of engaging youth participation in regional and national activities.

The hybrid model will impact APWLD because the secretariat would be located across the region. While I think our strength is that we recruited diverse staff from various countries into the secretariat, it will be a challenging period for staff on how to work together in this situation. However, this could also be an opportunity for APWLD to better ground our work when the secretariat has staff in national locations where we have a diverse membership of grassroots women.