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Sunday, March 12, 2023 Vol. 18 No. 148
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PHILIPPINE Navy warships are docked at the quays of the former Hanjin Subic shipyard, taking over a place previously occupied by newly built container vessels. TAKTIKOM NEWS & FEATURES
THE GHOST OF HANJIN PAST The former Hanjin shipyard in Subic is haunted by hopes discarded from its original development vision
C
By Henry Empeño
and couldn’t access them anymore upon return. Now the labor group and the homeowners association are asking pointed questions: What gives Fiesta Communities the right to evict them when [1] the lot where the housing units were built was donated by Hanjin to the workers, and [2] the fund used in constructing the houses came from Pag-IBIG, which is a government agency?
ASTILLEJOS, Zambales—Waving placards expressing their disgust over eviction and asserting their right to lawful use of housing units at a village here, former employees at the Hanjin shipyard in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone picketed the municipal hall here on Monday, March 6, to seek help from local government officials.
Hope and hype
CONFETTI rains down from the CMA CGM Antoine de Saint Exupery during the launch of the first Subic-made 20,600 TEU-class container vessel in January 2018 in the heyday of Hanjin ship production. HENRY EMPEÑO
The protest stemmed from an almost-forgotten agreement governing their stay at the Hanjin Village, a community purposely built by the South Korean shipbuilding firm for thousands of its workers and their families in the heyday of its ship production. A joint statement from the Samahan ng mga Manggagawa sa Hanjin (Samahan), a labor group of shipyard workers that withstood the demise of the Hanjin project in 2019, and the Hanjin Village Neighborhood Association (HVNA), an organization of residents at the Nagbunga housing site here, recalled that the Hanjin Village was built under a publicprivate-partnership (PPP) scheme with a P1.5-billion start-up fund from Hanjin.
The 30-hectare area where the village is located was donated by Hanjin to its workers under its corporate social responsibility program and registered under Transfer Certificate of Title 0442013001646, the Samahan and HVNA statement said. Meanwhile, the government’s Pag-IBIG Fund provided money to build housing units for qualified worker-members, and private developer Fiesta Communities, one of the pioneers in building low-cost housing in the country, was tapped for construction. Since the project was inaugurated by company officials in 2013, a total of 2,775 housing units sprang up in the Hanjin Village: 1,730 units in Phase 1, and 1,045 in Phase 2. Depending on their capac-
FORMER Hanjin workers and their families assert the right to stay in housing units at a village built by the defunct shipbuilding company. HANJIN VILLAGE NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION
ity to pay and personal preference, Hanjin workers could opt for any of three housing types: one-bedroom, two-bedroom duplex, or three-bedroom single detached unit. On top of this, Hanjin Village residents enjoyed community facilities like multipurpose hall, transport terminal, school and
other function centers that were provided by the company for free.
Housing woes
THE ideal work-life situation for Hanjin workers, however, suddenly plunged into chaos in January 2019 when the South Korean investor, which had placed Subic on
the map as the world’s fifth largest shipbuilder, declared bankruptcy. The Samahan and HVNA recalled that at this time—and because Hanjin had been laying off workers since late 2018 allegedly due to a slump in the world shipbuilding sector—only 46 homeowners out of the total 1,643 were now able to pay for the amortization of their housing units. The immediate solution was a moratorium on Pag-IBIG payments brokered by then Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III. This took effect in March 2019 and was understood by homeowners to continue being effective as the Covid-19 pandemic took a worldwide economic toll since that month. However, starting October 2022, a lot of homeowners have been evicted by Fiesta Communities under its buy-back scheme, wherein those who missed payments were asked to surrender their units to Fiesta for re-sale to other parties, Samahan and HVNA said. Some residents also complained that their units were padlocked when they were out of town
THE housing woes besetting former Hanjin workers could be just one bitter fallout from the meteoric rise and fall of the Hanjin shipyard in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, as well as the hype that followed when a white knight finally arrived to save the shipyard in distress. Established by the Hanjin Heavy Industries & Construction (HHIC) of South Korea in February 2006, HHIC-Phil Inc. rose to the industry’s rockstar prominence when it conducted steel-cutting for its first vessel order just one year after breaking ground for shipyard construction and delivering the Argolikos, the first container ship to be built in the Philippines, another year thereafter. HHIC-Phil Inc. initially pumped $1.7 billion into its 300-hectare shipyard at the Redondo Peninsula in Subic, Zambales. But putting in more facilities and equipment to increase its capacity brought the shipbuilder’s foreign direct investment in 2016 to $2.3 billion, the biggest in Subic since the free port was established in 1992. In terms of employment, Hanjin also became the single biggest employer in the Subic Bay Freeport as of August 2015, with some 30,000 workers at its shipbuilding facility making up 36 percent of the total Subic workforce. The Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA), which manages the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, also credited Hanjin with being among the major growth contributors in the Subic Freeport, as the firm set out in 2015 to complete at least 17 ships worth over $1.6 billion. Continued on A2
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 55.2380 n JAPAN 0.4057 n UK 65.8824 n HK 7.0372 n CHINA 7.9331 n SINGAPORE 40.8263 n AUSTRALIA 36.4018 n EU 58.4529 n KOREA 0.0416 n SAUDI ARABIA 14.7145 Source: BSP (March 10, 2023)