PRESIDENT Duterte is expected to sign an executive order (EO) on contractualization on or before May 1, Presidential Spokesman Harry L. Roque Jr. said on Monday.
“The President wants it as soon as possible. We all know that Labor Day is May 1. So, I would think that it will come out on or before May 1,” Roque said.
Asked why the scheduled meeting between the President and the labor groups was “cancelled” on Monday, Roque said he can only surmise that the final version of the EO has yet to be approved by concerned parties.
“It’s a tripartite document, which has to be agreed upon. So, possibly, they don’t have a final version yet,” he said, noting that the President is “restive” about this EO.
“He has mentioned to me personally that this is a campaign promise that he wants to deliver to the people very soon,” he added.
Roque said the Palace is crafting an EO that will side with labor forces, since this is what Duterte promised to the labor groups.
Regarding the new date for Duterte’s meeting with the labor groups, Roque said he needs to check the President’s schedule.
Labor Undersecretary Joel B. Maglunsod said in an earlier interview that they were informed by the Office of the President through the Bureau of Labor Relations that the meeting will not push through, without disclosing the reason.
Roque said Monday’s meeting between the President and the labor groups was not in his own calendar.
“I found a meeting with GSIS [Government Service Insurance System], another meeting with an ambassador and two private meetings. Unless the meeting was, you know, denominated as a private meeting, which it should not be. So, it was not even in my calendar,” he said.
Labor groups have long been waiting for the President to fulfill his campaign promise to end the practice of contractualization in the country through an EO, which has been put off several times already.
The draft EO submitted by the labor groups has been in Malacañang for several months now.
Meanwhile, two labor groups on Monday urged President Duterte to disregard the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) proposed EO on contractualization because it will not address the contractualization problem.
“The DTI [EO] draft is obviously [based on] a business-as-usual policy that allows labor contracting on almost all jobs and functions that has changed the norm of employment from direct-hiring to agency-hiring,” Rene Magtubo, chairman of Partido Manggagawa (PM), said in a statement.
Magtubo said “[t]he DTI [proposed EO that solidly supports] the employers…can never be a solution to the widespread contractualization of labor [in the Philippines].”
The labor leader made this assertion as he and other labor leaders who belong to the Nagkaisa Labor Coalition were alarmed after Durterte canceled his meeting with them on Monday, following the request of Trade Secretary Ramon M. Lopez. Lopez reportedly asked the President to postpone his meeting with the Nagkaisa labor leaders because he was afraid that Duterte will approve the Nagkaisa-proposed EO, which will eventually oblige businessmen to increase workers’ daily wages.
Magtubo, a former party-list representative, told Duterte that “[t]he employers are the main culprit for the proliferation of agency-hired employees, as such a culprit can never provide a solution to the problem he created,” thus, there is no basis to approve the DTI-proposed EO.
Duterte should accept and approve the proposed EO submitted by the Nagkaisa Labor Coalition, said Jose Sonny G. Matula, president of Federation of Free
Workers (FFW).
He added that Nagkaisa’s proposed EO “is more realistic to effectively address the existing epidemic of contractualization.”
He added the main point of the labor-proposed EO was the assurance that the security of tenure of the workers who have been working on different companies must be respected by directly hiring them as stipulated in the Philippine Constitution, Labor Code of the Philippines and different Supreme Court jurisprudence on labor issues.
He said Duterte knew that the security of tenure of the laborers in their employment is extremely important since the President is a lawyer himself.
Thus, Matula said FFW is appealing to Duterte to protect workers by ending contractualization.
The FFW leader, who also teaches labor laws in the College of Law of Manuel L. Quezon University, reminded Duterte that “[t]he economy is growing and expanding, but no trickle-down effect to the workers is felt because they have long been chained to contractual working arrangements.”
Thus, he added Duterte should approve the Nagkaisa-proposed EO, instead the one crafted
by the DTI.
FFW and PM believed that Congress would have a clear idea on what kind of law it will craft if Duterte approved Nagkaisa’s proposal.
With reports from Nelson S. Badilla