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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Regent looks to move away from Pasig City

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Regent Foods Corp. has said it might relocate away from Pasig City as the snack maker said Mayor Vico Sotto has already made up his mind to pursue an “unjust” deal with the company following a strike by some of its employees last week that led to arrests.

In a statement, RFC said it is still banking on the judicial system to resolve its issues with workers belonging to an illegal union. But after Sotto’s pronouncements in a Facebook post on Saturday, it was considering moving its business elsewhere, after opening shop in Pasig in 1988.

“Moving forward, RFC may simply accept its fate that the Pasig City Administration will unjustly make life hard for it and its 400-strong workforce, and contemplate simply bringing its business elsewhere”•a truly painful outcome for a corporation that has considered Pasig City its home for three decades now,” the company said.

RFC said it respects the sentiments of Sotto “inasmuch as it also respects the rights of its workers to hold a peaceful strike.” However, these rights “presuppose that the strike was first peaceful and that it was carried out within the bounds of the law.”

“Unfortunately, contrary to how Mayor Vico depicts the situation, the strike involved here was never legitimate and never peaceful, and up until it was dispersed, it was exercised in violation of RFC’s own rights, as well as the rights of other people,” it added.

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Noting it has continuously provided jobs to hundreds of workers, Pasig has been home to RFC for the last 30 years, and throughout its existence, RFC “has always been able to dialogue properly with its workforce on every concern”•labor or otherwise.”

Unfortunately, the company said, a minority group at RFC “was able to conduct a strike recently, although the same was done outside the confines of the law.”

“It had no legitimacy from the beginning since there is an existing sole and exclusive bargaining agent within the company. On top of this, the strikers also committed criminal activities during the conduct of their unlawful strike,” RFC added.

The company “was immediately accused of initiating a lockout when the truth of the matter is that it was the minority union”•UMRFC-KMU”•who locked RFC” and its employees out of the company, “gravely affecting the lives of more than 400 innocent employees.”

To address this situation early on, RFC said it sought the help of several government offices, “including that of Mayor Vico’s.” But in his FB post, Sotto “deliberately failed to disclose to the public that, before any of this had happened, RFC actually wrote his office to ask his assistance in amicably pacifying the situation.”

“This request merely fell on deaf ears, which is precisely what constrained RFC to resort to private security assistance for the sole purpose of reopening the gates of the company and resuming its usual business operations,” the company said.

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