Making sense out of conflicting (confusing?) court decisions

The law is what the Supreme Court says it is.

This legal adage springs from the nature of our government.  While it is congress that enacts or passes a law, it is the court that interprets it. Sometimes, the interpretation represents the true intent or spirit of the law as originally contemplated by the lawmakers. Sometimes, it does not.

But regardless of application, the important thing is to have consistency in the court’s rulings. This is because the ability of people to ascertain what the law is rests on the uniformity by which this law is applied.

You don’t need rocket science to explain this. People want to be certain that when the facts arising from a particular case are identical with past issues already ruled upon by the court, they expect that a similar ruling will be carried out. You call that legal precedent.

When that doesn’t happen, people are  perplexed. When there is apparent contradiction in the way the court resolves controversies, they lose faith in the competency of the court to perform its bounden duty. Worse, they see that as a failing of the entire justice system.

This problem about lack of consistency in court rulings is perhaps most pronounced in cases involving labor disputes.

Consider this:

In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that one solitary act of gross negligence justifies the termination of an employee. Such was the pronouncement in the case of LBC Express v. Mateo. It was important because it gave a logical application to what appeared to be an absurd rule under Art 282 of the Labor Code that requires that negligence must be both gross and habitual before it can be invoked in the termination of an employee. This was in June.

A month later, in July, 2009,   the same court did a complete turnaround and said that to justify termination in cases of negligence, it must be both gross and habitual (Abelardo Abel v. Philex Mining). Here’s what the court actually stated in the case: “The single or isolated act of negligence does not constitute a just cause for the dismissal of the employee”, stressing the need for habituality as a principal
requisite in dismissing the employee.

Here is another one.

Under the old rules, workers who strike or engage in any kind of concerted activity even without complying with the requisites of the law are not liable provided it can be shown that they were motivated by good faith (Ferrer v. CIR ; Phil Metal Foundries v. CIR, and continued even well after the adoption of the Labor Code in the case of Pepsi-Cola Labor Union v. NLRC).

But this good faith doctrine in strike cases was abandoned in First City Interlink Transportation v. Nieves Roldan-Confesor, when the court rightly said that even if the Union acted in good faith, the procedural requirements like notice, cooling off, and strike vote, must be complied with otherwise the strike is illegal. A subsequent case (Lapanday Workers Union v. NLRC) stated the obvious, that is, that procedural requirements for a valid strike under the Labor Code are mandatory and therefore, good faith as a defense against a charge of unlawful strike is no longer available to strikers.

Well, guess what. In A. Soriano Aviation Corporation v. A. Soriano Aviation Employees Association, decided only recently, the court adverted to this good faith doctrine as if it continues to remain as a valid ground to evade liability for an unlawful strike.

Worse, the principal pronouncement in the said case is a lot more troubling. In it, the court said that any illegal act committed during a strike immediately attaches illegality to the activity. In the process, it discarded the rule that liability for the commission of an illegal act in a strike situation is not collective but individual, as well as that other rule that illegal acts, to constitute as a basis for declaring a strike illegal, must be widespread, rampant or pervasive, that is, deliberately employed by the union as a matter of policy or strategy.

Other cases are just as inexplicable.  Take project employment for instance. A long line of decisions on this subject has already cemented the rule that while project employment does not entitle the employee to become a regular employee, the repeated rehiring of the employee on a succession of similar projects will extend to the employee the status of a regular employee (Maraguinot v. NLRC; etc.) But in the 2010 case of William Uy Construction Corporation v. Jorge, citing the case of Caseres v. Universal Robina Sugar Milling Corporation,  the Court said exactly the opposite, saying that “…the repeated and successive rehiring of project employees do not qualify them as regular employees, as length of service is not the controlling determinant of the employment tenure of a project employee.”

But the classic in inconsistency, or judicial legislation if you may, is the case of the rule in probationary employment. In article 281 of the labor code, the law is explicit is saying that probationary employment shall not exceed six months. The Court struck down that codal rule in many decisions, among them the case of Boiser v. NLRC where it inexplicably considered 18 months of probation as valid in the work of those whose key job objective was to solicit advertisement for the yellow pages.

In a recent decision involving Rustan Supermarkets, the court laid down the rule that there must be proportionality between offense committed and penalty imposed as it overturned the action of the company, stating that termination for an employee who had rendered over 30 years of service was in effect, unconscionable.

This is well and good except that in the case of Reno Foods, Inc. vs. Nagkakaisang Lakas ng Manggagawa (NLM), decided just a year ago, it paid no heed to the seniority of the employee on the job and ruled for termination even if the factual antecedents of the case was somewhat similar to that of Romales. In fact, it derided length of service as a basis for any consideration saying that “…Length of service is not a bargaining chip that can simply be stacked against the employer. After all, an employer-employee relationship is symbiotic where both parties benefit from mutual loyalty and dedicated service.”

It used to be that when there is a close shop provision in the CBA, the bargaining representative/winner of certification election can demand that even old employees who are not affiliated with any union at the time of the signing of the CBA must sign up with it as member otherwise it can rightfully demand their termination from the company under a union security clause (Juat v. CIR; Freemen shirt v. NLRC). This old ruling, unfair to begin with, was supposed to have been abandoned in subsequent decisions of the court involving the same subject matter.

But it doesn’t seem to be the case now. In BPI v. BPI Employees Assn of Davao, the court appeared to have back slided to the old rule, side stepping a dissenting opinion of Justice Antonio Carpio that reiterated the prevailing jurisprudence regarding the issue.

There are other confusing if not actually conflicting decisions but the point is clear; we cannot have many deviations in court rulings and  expect the people to be guided appropriately in determining what the law is in a given situation.

This is not to demean the court in any way.  But labor cases are a different matter. Everyday, hundreds of cases are filed before the NLRC. They arise from disputes that mark the often contentious relationship between management and labor.  We need to approach such conflicts in a manner that will convince adversarial parties of the majesty of the law, not the checkered type of judgments that leave everyone breathless with anticipation as to how the court is going to decide a particular question of law.

When doctrinal rulings do not hold and are reversed every so often by the court, it emboldens losing litigants to continue fighting for even the silliest of cases in the hope that the court may just decide to sustain them. Thus, the court is clogged with
labor cases, because it has become clear that pursuing cases has ceased to be a matter of evidence or merit. It has become a game of chance. –Atty. Manuel A. Quiambao, Philippine Daily Inquirer

(The author is the Corporate Secretary and Associate Dean of the Law School of Jose Rizal University. A Bar Reviewer in Labor Law, he is legal counsel to several companies, including a number of multi-national corporations.)