Big labor group opposes salary cap for nurses

THE country’s largest labor group on Monday criticized a House bill that would fix nurses’ starting salaries at P14,000 a month, saying it was degrading.

The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines said the Angara bill would demote Filipino nurses who were now entitled to a starting salary of P22,000.

“If Congressman Juan Edgardo Angara wishes to follow the footsteps of his father and become senator someday, he should promptly withdraw his bill, which degrades our nurses,” said group president Ernesto Herrera, a former chairman of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development.

Angara, a member of the House prosecution panel in the impeachment case against Chief Justice Renato Corona, is the son of Senator Edgardo Angara whose send consecutive term in the Senate expires next year.

Herrera cited the Nursing Law of 2002 that pegged a public nurse’s floor pay at P22,688 at least.

“The only reason the higher pay rate is not being enforced by public hospitals is because the government claims it does not have the wherewithal,” Herrera said.

He said private sector nurses would remain underpaid “as long as the government itself pays [the nurses in public hospitals] poorly.”

He said Philippine Health Insurance Corp. was already paying nurses P15,000 monthly, which was higher than the salary being pushed by Angara.

Herrera has been pressing for the opening of new foreign labor markets and the creation of local employment programs for the growing number of jobless nurses.

He is also pressing for the shutdown of substandard schools, which he said had been depriving nursing students of a proper education.

Nurses are now the nation’s second-largest group of professionals after teachers. The Professional Regulation Commission estimates the number of unemployed nurses at 300,000. –Vito Barcelo, Manila Standard Today