Serge Cherniguin, fondly known as Nong Serge to people in Negros, was an indefatigable union organizer who dedicated his life, up to his last breath, to uplifting the lives of sugarcane workers in Negros, the fourth largest island in the Philippines and the country’s sugar bowl.
Cherniguin’s father was Russian, a former officer in the tsarist navy who fled his native country after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, first to Shanghai in China, then to Mindanao before settling in Negros where he married a Filipina and raised a family. Nong Serge was their first and only son, followed by four daughters. He died when Nong Serge was only nine. As administrator of a big landowner, the elder Cherniguin enforced regulations that were grossly unfair to the plantation workers — something that his son would realize later.
After finishing high school in Cadiz, the teenager was sent to Manila by his father’s employer to take up studies in agriculture. After two years he returned to Negros and worked as a hacienda overseer. When martial law was declared in 1972, he was already an assistant administrator running six sugarcane plantations. By then, he had slowly come to recognize the many injustices inherent in the system that provided his livelihood.
Starvation wages kept the people very poor, even as the big landlords lived ostentatiously. The shocking plight of the sacadas or migrant field hands, and their families, was brought to national attention through reports in the media.
Negros was at the center of social and political convulsions in an era where the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing the radical reforms of Vatican II. The concept of a “preferential option for the poor” was embraced by many of the young clergy and laity, and some senior clergy as well.
Serge Cherniguin was then a young administrator, trying to apply what he had learned in college. He helped the workers to enroll in the government programs for social security and health benefits. He increased wages. Production improved. The plantation managers were displeased by higher costs. He resigned and found another job, but found that his next employer treated workers even more badly. So many questions bothered him, a devout Catholic since boyhood. The answers came as he listened to a Redemptorist priest who was preaching in Hacienda Victorias.
“I was thunderstruck,” he said later. “I realized that God does not make people poor. It is people who make other people poor. In fact, God made the world so rich – natural resources and everything – particularly the Philippines, particularly Negros. I even realized that I was acting as an agent of oppression and exploitation; that I was working for the pharaoh!”
In 1973, Serge Cherniguin met and became friends with Fr. Edgar Saguinsin, one of the founders of the National Federation of Sugarcane Workers (NFSW). Union organizing especially in Negros became even more dangerous, especially for someone with family responsibilities, but the disaffected administrator applied to work for the NFSW anyway. Starting in January 1975, he began by spending a lot of time putting down roots in the workers’ communities. He joined the experienced organizers who breached harsh security to organize new unions in the haciendas. He helped put up small projects like garden plots on the riverbanks, where they grew root crops and bananas to augment family incomes and meals.
Cherniguin was a biracial Filipino: big, tall and fair-skinned. He was often mistaken for a foreigner, a missionary priest, but he was fluent in Hiligaynon; and surely he was in his native land.
Union work meant carefully keeping out of sight of plantation guards. Priests and nuns were considered subversive, and banned from hacienda premises. Under the Marcos dictatorship, 24 union organizers were killed and many more were imprisoned. In 1978, in the midst of a severe famine, Nong Serge was himself jailed along with 129 others after they tried to plant food crops on fallow land.
In 1979, Serge Cherniguin became a member of the NFSW executive secretariat, a position he held until 1985. And in 1985 to 1988, he led the federation as its secretary-general.
Those were very, very hard times for the sugar industry workers of Negros. The world market price of the commodity had plunged in 1975 from 67 cents to 13 cents per pound. To cut their losses, the planters limited production areas to just a portion of the former hectarage planted to sugarcane. Field hands and mill workers could find no work. Their families went desperately hungry.
What’s more, the industry – controlled by the dictator Marcos’ close friend, Roberto Benedicto – was crippled by cronyism and corruption.
The people’s anger boiled over in massive mass protests. In 1982, Cherniguin led around 2,000 sugar mill workers and farm hands in a strike over non-payment of their 13th month pay at La Carlota. The strike lasted for 18 days and Cherniguin was wounded in the leg during dispersal operations.
A three-day Welgang Bayan or people’s strike was held in Escalante, Kabankalan and in Bacolod City. Cherniguin addressed the rally in Escalante on Sept. 20, 1985, just hours before constabulary and paramilitary forces opened fire on the people, killing 20 and wounding dozens more. He had just returned to Bacolod when news of the massacre broke out.
As an NFSW leader, Serge Cherniguin attended international forums and brought the plight of the sugar workers to the attention of audiences abroad.
Importantly, Nong Serge never neglected to nurture his family even as he was fully available to the workers as their leader. He made sure that his wife and children understood, supported and shared his dedication to the cause. He even wrote winning oratorical pieces for them.
After the Marcos dictatorship ended with the EDSA People Power Revolution, Cherniguin stayed on. He expanded the NFSW’s program of acquiring farm lots for the workers, and partnered with international organizations to introduce new agriculture techniques. He was also among those who lobbied for genuine land reform under the presidency of Corazon Aquino.
It was after working past midnight that Cherniguin died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 59.
His family and friends, even critics of the union, recognized that he had been an exemplary activist who lived modestly all his life, selflessly neglecting his own health when the workers urgently needed his help. Many thousands visited his wake which lasted for two week. His funeral procession was one of the longest ever seen in Bacolod City.
(Photos from Serge’s 1986 interview published at L’INA éclaire l’actu)
