Workers group debunks govt’ claim, says companies dismissing employees

By Chito Chavez, Manila Bulletin, Dec 28, 2018

The militant group Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) has debunked the government’s claim that nearly 500,000 workers have been regularized under the administration of President Duterte.

Stressing the need to uplift the workers’ rights, KMU called Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello’s statement “far from reality and pure propaganda.”

The labor group stressed “while it is true that there were regularization orders from the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to different companies, the reality is that companies are not complying with the orders and are instead dismissing workers in droves.”

KMU said that among the most notorious violators of DOLE’s regularization orders are Jollibee Foods Corp. (JFC) and Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT.)

In cynical contempt of Bello, the group said Jollibee, which was ordered to regularize 6,482 workers earlier this year, simply laid off its workers.

The group noted that Bello also told PLDT to regularize 7,344 workers from 38 of PLDT’s third-party service contractors but the telecommunications giant shrugged off his order and laid off workers by scuttling the contracts of its third-party service contractors.

Describing it as a failure, the KMU claimed Bello’s order was overturned by the Court of Appeals (CA) in August 2018.

KMU rapped DOLE’s approach that gave leeway to employers in “voluntarily” regularizing instead of implementing the full compliance with its regularization orders.

“This bogus ‘voluntary’ regularization scheme has left more contractual workers than ever since companies would opt not to regularize in order to retain their profit margins,” KMU said.

In a recent picket at DOLE’s office in Intramuros, workers from multinational banana company Sumifru Phils. Corp. lambasted Bello for failing to execute the final and executory of 2010 DOLE decision on their regularization which was also affirmed by the Supreme Court (SC) on June 7, 2017.

“We are a testament that DOLE is inutile in implementing the law, and even the regularization orders which it eagerly claims as its achievement. We have long been declared as regular workers of Sumifru, but the company is blatantly disregarding the SC’s order and the DOLE failed to act on it,” said Paul John Dizon, president of Nagkahiusang Mamumuo sa Suyapa Farm (NAMASUFA-NAFLU-KMU).

The KMU in Southern Mindanao also revealed that the DOLE in Region 11 has been contradicting Bello’s claim that the department has fulfilled the campaign promise of President Duterte to end contractualization.

KMU argued that despite the discovery by inspectors that four firms in the region had been engaged in numerous acts of illegal job contracting, DOLE in Region 11 disregarded the findings of the labor inspectors and claimed illegal job contracting or labor-only contracting did not happen. (Chito Chavez)