Labor fears job losses from Covid

By William B. Depasupil, Manila Times, 1 Mar 2020

THOUSANDS of workers in the airline, hotel and restaurant business and allied industries, including overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and seafarers or sea-based workers, stand to lose their jobs in the coming months amid growing coronavirus outbreaks, according to the country’s largest labor group.

The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) on Saturday said some 7,000 airlines, cruise ships, travel agencies, and hotel and restaurants workers were likely to be laid off within the next six months as more enterprises would be forced to implement rentrenchments programs to cope with the business losses caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).

On Friday, the country’s flag carrier Philippine Airlines began laying off as many as 300 employees to reduce its financial losses, which were exacerbated by the recent Taal Volcano eruption and the continued spread of Covid-19 worldwide.

“The PAL retrenchment program and the travel bans will trigger more layoffs in several of its supply chains that include hotels, restaurants, land transport service, logistics, catering and other suppliers of the airlines. It is now inevitable that other airlines, to cope with the crisis, will also make similar retrenchments of non-essential jobs, which will also affect workers down their supply chains,” TUCP President and party-list Rep. Raymond Mendoza said.

He added that other workers who would be seriously affected are Filipino seafarers working in passenger cruise and cargo ships.

Mendoza cited the case of the more than 500 Filipino crew of the grounded cruise ship Diamond Princess who were laid off over the Covid-19 outbreak.

“Job orders for Filipino seafarers are zero. Other Filipino crew in other cruise ships are about to be sent home in the next few weeks including those with unexpired contract in case passenger bookings being monitored by ship operators and shipowners are unable to meet the number of passengers required for the trip,” he said.

The TUCP said it was urging shipowners and manning agencies to abide by their collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) with their unionized crew and come up with a reasonable retrenchment and separation package for crew who do not have
contracts and CBAs with them.

It added that more land-based OFWs working as teachers, drivers, entertainers, cooks, waiters, receptionists and household service workers would also be hit by the economic slump in countries and would be coming back home.

Domestic enterprises and local companies indirectly affected but “feeling the heat’ of the growing crisis brought about by the outbreak of Covid-19 are into the mode of employing mechanisms to minimize the backlash of the economic repercussion of the outbreak.

These coping measures include forced leaves, voluntary separation schemes, work-from-home arrangements and other operational cost-saving measures to avoid losses.

To cushion the impact of layoffs and retrenchments, the TUCP asked the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) to call for national tripartite and bipartite dialogues among workers, business and employers and government agencies in drawing balanced resiliency measures that would be acceptable to both labor and capital for the State to survive.

It said it would also call on the government to convene the National Tripartite Industrial Peace Council composed of labor, business and the DoLE, Department of Trade and Industry and Department of Finance to craft mitigating measures against the economic and social impact of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Tripartite social dialogue practice was institutionalized in 1990 through Executive Order 403 and through Republic Act 10395 in 2013 also known as Tripartism Law to promote industrial peace and establish mechanism to avoid industrial strife among workers and business owners.

“The DoLE should now convene the industrial peace councils established in various industries in drafting common measures for workers and employers to cope,” Mendoza said.

Top officials of the Associated Labor Unions (ALU), the biggest labor federation of unions in the country, supported the idea of social dialogue between workers and employers in forging measures to cushion the impact of Covid-19 on business and workers and their families down to the plant level.

“Workers and their families are feeling the heat. Should the big crisis become imminent, we still have a small window of time to make the necessary adjustments for an enterprise and plant-level discussions between employees and business-owners to forge a consensus that would stabilize the company and save jobs in the face of the shocks borne by Covid-19 outbreak,” according to ALU National Executive Vice President Gerard Seno.

Seno said among the issues commonly raised by employees are the treatment of employees during these extraordinary working circumstances are whether employers can terminate or suspend employment contract, suspend some provisions of collective bargaining agreements between unions and management, and how to pay remunerations to employees who are required or under self-quarantine imposed by the management or the government.