By ANNE MARXZE D. UMIL
Bulatlat.com
MANILA — Karapatan denounced the Department of Education’s (DepEd) internal memorandum requesting a list of teachers affiliated with the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT).
The group said that such moves “strongly endanger the lives and safety of teachers as well as their right to organize and form unions.”
“DepEd Secretary and Vice President Sara Duterte has repeatedly targeted ACT in her rabid red-tagging tirades, and this new memo requesting a list of ACT-affiliated teachers can only be seen as the latest in her insidious schemes,” Palabay said in a statement. “Under the murderous regime of her father, we have seen how such lists have been used as hitlists. This is an instigation of tokhang against teachers, and it should be strongly denounced.”
The internal memorandum, dated June 14 and issued by DepEd Undersecretary for Operations Atty. Revsee Escobedo, requested all regional directors and school division superintendents for a list of teachers affiliated with ACT who are availing of the Automatic Payroll Deduction System (APDS).
In a news report, DepEd said that there is also a separate request for the list of members of other unions, organizations and associations of teaching and non-teaching personnel availing of APDS.
DepEd also denied that the request for list of ACT members “did not intend to target members of the teacher’s union.”
Palabay said this is not the first time that government agencies have tried to profile teachers affiliated with ACT.
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Palabay cited the December 2018 leaked internal memoranda from various local police branches instructing intelligence units to conduct an “inventory” of ACT-affiliated teachers.
In March 2021, Palabay said that a letter from the Department of the Interior and Local Government also instructed its regional directors to “investigate” and identify members of ACT for their supposed “infiltration” of several government agencies. The same letter red-tagged the teachers’ union as a “front organization” of “communist-terrorist groups.”
“It is undeniable that this latest memo from DepEd is part of a long trend of similar attacks against ACT, and such moves — with their intent to profile ACT’s members — not only violate rights to privacy and security as well as teachers’ basic right to organize and unionize: they also put teachers at the crosshairs of state harassment, repression, and violence,” Palabay said.
The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) meanwhile pointed out that the said DepEd memo violates the constitutional rights to form unions for purposes not contrary to law and to freedom of speech or expression, which, under the Bill of Rights, cannot be abridged.
“In one case, freedom of association was recognized as ‘the most natural privilege’ of the people to combine their exertions with those of others and to act in common with them. The Supreme Court also clarified that in interpreting the term ‘contrary to law,’ there is no justification for abridging freedom of association unless an organization has been shown “to create an imminent danger to public safety,” the lawyers group said in a statement.
The NUPL added that to disclose ACT teachers’ membership also constitutes a grievous breach of the informational aspect of their constitutional right to privacy which is protected under the Data Privacy Act of 2012.
Palabay said that “DepEd should stop acting like a footstool of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict and its deranged campaign of red-tagging and state fascism, and Sara Duterte should step down from her post as DepEd secretary.”
“Clearly, she is not keen on addressing the country’s education crisis and is instead weaponizing the department for her sinister militarist agenda,” she said. (RTS, DAA) 
