DOLE: 2011 most peaceful year on labor-management front

With only two work stoppages between January and November, the year 2011 can be considered the most peaceful so far for industrial relations in the Philippines, the Department of Labor and Employment said Tuesday.

DOLE Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz claimed “reforms” in labor arbitration and adjudication brought about such positive results in the local labor front.

“The highly successful and effective conciliation-mediation efforts of the National Conciliation and Mediation Board (NCMB) have led to tempering the occurrence of actual work stoppages, thus maintaining a single-digit actual strike rate for the past several years,” Baldoz said.

Conciliation-mediation, a DOLE program started in 1988, is a mode of dispute settlement that brings together contending parties in a dispute to come to negotiations and settlement.

Baldoz cited the year-end report of the NCMB, where only two work stoppages occurred from January to November of 2011.

This was a 75-percent drop from the eight strikes recorded during the same period in 2010.

“The two strikes occurred in the National Capital Region (NCR) and in Region 3 (Central Luzon) while the rest of the regions were strike- and lock-out free during the period, mainly due to the functional workplace conflict prevention and settlement schemes, i.e., plant-level grievance machinery, and workplace cooperation and partnership schemes, i.e., labor-management councils,” Baldoz said.

She said the two declared strike cases involved deadlocks in collective bargaining agreement (BD) and resulted to man-days lost.

However, she noted the loss of man-days was still a dramatic decrease by 89 percent, or from 34,171 last year to only 3,828 this year.

“What is significant was that the NCMB disposed the two declared strikes to achieve a 100 percent disposition rate,” she said.

Baldoz said the NCMB’s overall dispute management rate (ratio of the total number of notices of strike/lockout and preventive mediation cases that did not materialize into actual work stoppage to the total notices of strike/lockout and preventive mediation cases handled) was computed at 99.73 percent.

“This just goes to show that NCMB’s conciliation-mediation services have proven very effective in resolving labor disputes in keeping the incidence of work stoppages at the minimum, if not nil,” she said.

She also said the one-day average disposition of actual work stoppages is 10 days faster that it took to dispose actual strike cases last year.

Baldoz added this year marked the single biggest settlement package in a conciliation case involving the CBA of the International Wiring Systems Philippines Corp., a locator at the Luisita Industrial Park, with the settlement package amounting to P2.8 billion.

It brought to P4.1 billion the amount of CBA packages, separation pay, and other restitution benefits facilitated by the NCMB which benefitted 11,484 workers.

Due to an innovation introduced by the NCMB in handling cases that have been subjected to intervention by the Office of the Secretary, Baldoz said the number of cases subjected to her intervention continue to decline.

“The continuous marathon conciliation-mediation conferences and exploration of all options for possible settlement, prior to any decision to assume jurisdiction over the cases, helped reduce these cases of assumption by the Secretary,” she said.

“Our conciliator-mediators at NCMB and at the Office of the Secretary continue to exert efforts in exploring every possible means to effect amicable settlement in every case they handle,” she said. — ELR/KG, GMA News