INDEED, how can the Duterte administration end the “endo” (end of contract / labor contractualization) practice when the government itself is the biggest “endo” employer around?
In the public sector, according to the Inventory of Government Human Resources as of July 1, 2016, there were 721,282 contract of service (COS), job orders (JOs), casual, and contractual workers out of the 2,301,191 government employees. This figure is more than twice the 282,586 contractual workers in the public sector in 2008. Top agencies in 2016 with the most number of JOs and COS included the Department of Public Works and Highways, Department of Health, Department of Social Welfare and Development, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, and Department of Education.
Contractualization is so prevalent that non-regular workers comprise a significant portion of the government’s workforce. From around 10 percent non-regular employees in the 1990s, the contractuals comprised more than 31 percent of the government employees in 2016.
In the Department of Social Welfare and Development alone in 2013, contractual workers comprised 20,840 out of the total 25,589 employees, or 81.44 percent of the agency workforce.
In another case, in the country’s premier public tertiary school, University of the Philippines, in 2012, 44 percent of the employees were contractual. In the University of the Philippines – Philippine General Hospital as of January 2018, 1,614 out of 4,461 health workers or 36.18 percent, were contractual, job-order, casual or temporary workers .
With these figures, how can the President say his administration is anti-endo and anti-labor contractualization?
Until now, labor contractualization blatantly violates the worker’s right to security of tenure.
