MANILA – President Rodrigo Duterte certified as urgent a Senate bill that prohibits labor contractualization, colloquially known as endo, or “end of contract.”
Writing Senate President Vicente Sotto III, Duterte urged the Senate to pass its own version of the bill after the House of Representatives has approved its own.
“I have certified as urgent measure Senate Bill 1826 … to strengthen the workers’ security of tenure by prohibiting the prevalent practices of contractualization and labor-only contracting,” the President said.
“These labor practices continue to immerse our workers in a quagmire of poverty and underemployment,” he added. “I hereby certify to the necessity of the immediate enactment of Senate Bill No. 1826.”
The Senate’s Security of Tenure bill prohibits the hiring workers for fixed-term arrangements, or the “end of contract” scheme.
Sen. Joel Villanueva, chairman of the committee on labor, employment, and human resources development, lauded the certification of Duterte, noting that contractualization affects 1.9 million workers in the private sector.
“The Security of Tenure bill, once passed into law, will remove ambiguities in the Labor Code, which is the source of circumventions,” Villanueva said in a statement released Tuesday.
The bill will also prohibit labor-only contracting, and provide penalties for violation, limit job contracting to licensed and specialized services, classify workers into regular and probationary employees, and treat project and seasonal employees as regular employees, provide security of tenure, clarify standards on probationary employment, and provide “Transition Support Program” for employees while they are not at work or transitioning in between jobs.
“Giving our workers certainty and social protection makes them more efficient and more productive,” Villanueva said.
“We certainly need a law that will not only uphold our workers’ basic labor rights and restore dignity of work, but also a law that will promote quality employment without jeopardizing business operations but rather create more stable jobs for every Filipino,” he added.
Prior to this, Duterte signed an executive order on contractualization, which did not include a stipulation prohibiting all forms of contracting and makes direct hiring the only legal arrangement – which was what labor groups sought.
During his third State of the Nation Address in July, Duterte acknowledged the limitations of his new executive order and called on Congress to amend the “outdated” Labor Code./PN
