THE President’s decision to no longer issue an executive order to stop “endo,” or the practice of hiring workers for less than six months to avoid regularization and payment of full benefits, seems to fly in the face of his campaign promise to end the abusive practice.
Labor groups who had been won over by Duterte’s promise had been looking forward to obtaining an EO by Labor Day, a hope that was fueled by the President’s spokesman—until his announcement last week that there would be no such order, after all, and that the President would follow Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III’s recommendation to leave it to Congress to pass a law.
The EO that labor groups had hoped for would have banned the practice of short-term and unprotected work arrangements.
But business groups have been vocal in opposing such limits, pointing out that contract work is allowed under the Labor Code, and claiming that new restrictions would drive away investments and mean fewer jobs all around.
On the other hand, as a leftist lawmaker points out, the government itself is the largest employer of contractual employees.
How can the Duterte administration end “endo” when the Inventory of Government Human Resources shows that as of July 1, 2016, there are 721,282 contract of service, job orders, casual, and contractual workers out of the 2.3 million government employees, Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Carlos Zarate says.
This figure is more than twice the 282,586 contractual workers in the public sector in 2008, he adds, with the top employers of contract work being the Department of Public Works and Highways, the Department of Health, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Education.
In the University of the Philippines, the premier state university, 44 percent of employees are contractual. In UP-Philippine General Hospital, the number of contractual workers account for 36 percent or more than a third of the employees.
In the DSWD, a staggering 81 percent of workers are without regular status, Zarate added.
From the outside looking in, it would seem the President’s refusal to sign an EO on endo is a sign that the administration has buckled under the pressure of business and employers’ groups. Or, perhaps the President simply realized that if he really wants to end endo, he needs to start in his own backyard—something he may not be willing to do just yet.