Taking workers for a ride

GOVERNMENT now says it is powerless to end the practice of labor contractualization in the country and has passed the buck to Congress. Describing this latest development as unfortunate is an understatement. This is a big letdown.

Around 30 million Filipinos of the 41 million labor force are working under contractualization scheme without security of tenure and other benefits received by regular workers. They are paid poverty wages, and accorded with poor social protection insurance benefits despite having rendered labor throughout their productive years.

If Malacañang is indeed sincere in eradicating contractualization, it should have supported a true anti-contractualization bill instead of the compromised, thus, pseudo Security of Tenure (SOT) Bill or House Bill 6908 passed by the House that could only lead to systematic and mass termination of current regular employees.

As it is now, it appears that Malacañang is only posturing and taking workers for a ride. The little concessions the House SOT bill gives to labor will be dwarfed by the legitimization and expected proliferation of job contractors and job contracting schemes and the deletion of performing desirable and necessary jobs in the definition of regular employment.

Worse, the President might say his election campaign promise to end “endo” or labor contractualization was just a joke.

Instead of eradicating, the administration-supported bill legitimizes, even encourages and further opens the flood gates for all forms of job contracting schemes even on desirable or necessary jobs being performed by regular employees. Capitalists can now contract out bigger parts of their production or services from job contractors, terminate and replace their current regular employees performing desirable or necessary jobs with more cheap labor, be they “permanent or seasonal” supplied by job contractors. This runs counter to the basic demand of workers both in the private and public sectors to have security of tenure.

We hope the President would fulfill and not renege on his commitment to free millions of workers from the bondage of abusive labor slavery under contractualization. We hope he would keep his promise to end contractualization.