More madness

Last Monday I wrote about House Bill 4853, otherwise known as the Security of Tenure Act. The proposed law was submitted for plenary discussion by the Committee on Labor and Employment of the House of the Representatives just before Congress went into recess early this month. HB 4853 has two counterpart measures in the Senate. The first one, Senate Bill 171 was filed by Senator Antonio F. Trillanes while Senate Bill 858 was filed by Senator Jinggoy Estrada. Both Senate bills tackle the issue of security of tenure.

The Senate bills are essentially similar to HB 4853. But I must be stressed that Estrada—who is chairman of the Senate’s labor, employment and human resource development committee—and his staff seemed more open to getting inputs from as many sectors as possible and to an enlightened discussion on the matter.

The Senate bills do not contain the alarming provisions limited the number of probationary employees a company can hire at any given time to 30 percent of its total workforce. However, the Senate bills also prescribe a cap on the number of contractual employees that can be hired. Moreover, the Senate bills propose to shorten the probationary period from the current six months, to only three months; something that is untenable since it is obviously not enough time to determine an employee’s overall fitness for a job or conversely, an company’s suitability as an employer.

What we can glean from all these is that there is, undeniably, a concerted effort to push the measure.

Actually there were originally eight bills filed in the House of Representatives and four bills filed in the Senate, each one crafted supposedly to protect security of tenure of employees. Unfortunately, all of these bills operate from the same basic and faulty paradigm, which is that the goal of protecting the security of tenure of employees can only be achieved by curtailing the flexibility of employers. In short, the goal of promoting the welfare of employees cannot be pursued hand in hand with promoting business interests.

The reality is that there are already more than enough laws in this country that protect security of tenure of employees. The problem is that just like in other areas of our national life, we are very lax in terms of ensuring strict compliance to the laws.

This same generalization can be applied to our problems with traffic congestion, tax collection, agrarian reform, etc. There are more than enough laws to make things work. Unfortunately, strict implementation of our laws and ensuring strict compliance to them has never been one of our stronger suits. And to make matters worst, when things go wrong our default response is to create more laws, which only tend to complicate matters some more.

The other reality that is staring us in the face, which our legislators do not seem to comprehend, is that the proposed measure on security of tenure actually addresses only those employed in the formal sector, which comprises less than six million of the 32 million or so workers in this country. More than 76 percent of the total workforce in this country work in the informal sector comprised of those who are self-employed, subcontracted home-workers, informal employees in family-operated farms or businesses, unpaid family workers, uncounted numbers of workers toiling under the boundary system such as drivers, and domestic workers employed by households. The vast majority of workers do not stand to benefit from any such legislation.

If we truly want to do something to effectively address the welfare of workers in this country, we need to acquire a more macro, more comprehensive, and definitely more strategic perspective of the problem. –Bong Austero, Manila Standard Today