DAVAO CITY—Labor Secretary-designate Silvestre H. Bello III on Wednesday said he will subject all Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) agency officials and units to a performance audit to weed out so-called undesirables—from labor attaches to arbiters.
Bello, who was earlier picked by presumptive President Rodrigo R. Duterte to handle the stalled peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front (NDF), said that the “new landscape” at the DOLE “is also an opportunity for me to look at the various ways why our labor laws have been criticized as not serving the interest of our workers.”
Duterte was quoted as saying in his earlier pronouncements that he would appoint personalities identified with the left to some Cabinet positions, notably the DOLE and the Department of Social Welfare and Development. Bello, however, denied in an early morning interview over the state-run Radyo ng Bayan on Wednesday that he is from the left.
“The performance audit would allow us to know if there are really evidence pointing to the many allegations against many department officials and personnel,” he said.
The audit would include the labor arbiters whom, he said, have been criticized for allegedly delaying arbitration cases or favouring management in their decisions lodged by aggrieved workers.
“We would also like to know if the complaints were indeed true against our labor attaches that they are conniving with employers in countries [where] they are assigned,” Bello added.
He also warned DOLE officials with links with illegal recruiters, saying that “because these people [illegal recruiters] cannot operate without [the] connivance from people inside the DOLE.”
Bello added that he will prioritize the holding discussions with labor unions and with Donald Dee, president of the Employers Confederation of the Philippines.
“I would like to assure Dee that the President is not really fighting employers when he announced [that the incoming administration will get rid of the practice of] contractualization,” he said.
“We would consult both capital and labor, but while there are businesses that must enforce regular employment, there are also operations that must be exempted,” Bello said.
He cited as example “the biggest shipbuilding operation in the East in Balamban, Cebu, which is not known to many” and which engage in job outs.
“It hires about 800 regular employees, but there are occasions when orders for new ships would force the company to hire people on job-order basis. You just cannot order them to hire an additional 12,000 people on regular basis for the completion of one new ship,” he said.
“But for the big shopping malls where there are hundreds of sales girls who are terminated after five months, it’s a different situation. These malls must hire them on regular basis because they need these sales girls for their operation,” Bello said.
Bello also mentioned a Congressional bill he authored while in Congress “which did not touch first base because I am with the minority.”
“That bill provides penal sanction against companies that violate the provision on contractualization,” he said.
“This contractualization is a law that must be given teeth because employers and recruiters easily go around the law. And people in the DOLE do not implement it,” he said.