Twilight proclamation

WHEN PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gave the country a day off to pay homage to the passing of the executive minister of the Iglesia ni Cristo, one sector was specifically excluded: the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector. This was, according to the President, in recognition of the BPO industry’s importance to “national economic interest.”

BPOs operate on a different timeline – literally – from the rest of the country, one that neither comprehends nor tolerates Philippine domestic events and holidays. For this reason, BPOs would have required their workers to come in for work, anyway. What the President actually did was not to compel the BPO employees to work; rather, she required them to work without enjoying the economic benefits other productively employed people in the country normally enjoy during holidays. The “economic interest” served by the President’s Proclamation No. 1874-B then was purely that of the owners of the BPOs.

The Labor Code provides for additional compensation of at least 30 percent of the regular wage of an employee if work is required on a Sunday, rest day or special holiday. (And if holiday work falls on an employee’s scheduled rest day, an additional compensation is set at 50 percent of the regular wage.) When required to work on regular non-working holidays, employees are entitled to compensation equivalent to twice the worker’s regular rate. The lone exemption to this, under the law, covers only the retail and service establishments with fewer than 10 workers.

The President, however, decreed an exemption for the BPO industry without the benefit of emergency powers. We wonder where she could have derived the authority to grant an exemption for an entire industry, an essentially discriminatory act against the employees of that industry as her decision favored the employers exclusively.

We speak up for BPO workers because they are essentially bound and gagged by regulations imposed by their employers, who all too often impose non-disclosure requirements on new hires; and who refuse them opportunities to organize themselves, in effect denying them the opportunities to collectively bargain with their employers. As it is, BPO work is essentially seasonal and project-based, and so contractual employment is the norm. Contractual work has long been a means for denying workers the security and corresponding benefits that come, by force of law, from permanent status.

This means that management can be as draconian as it wishes when it comes to breaks (in too many instances, just an hour’s break, including elevator time, for a 9-to-10-hour shift), leaves, working conditions (ranging from unsanitary work places to security cameras to monitor employees, while not according them grievance mechanisms particularly in cases of corporate nepotism or sexual harassment) and holiday and other compensation issues.

This means that government has taken sides, abandoning the proper role it should play in balancing the competing interests of labor and capital, at the expense of BPO workers, majority of whom are young. It is true that hundreds of thousands of young Filipinos find never-before possible opportunities in the BPOs; but this doesn’t mean condemning them – in the name of the “national economic interest” – to conditions that will never change or only deteriorate.

There is a cost to uncritically pandering to BPO owners, and it includes the costs in mental and physical health of workers operating on a nocturnal schedule, unable to even negotiate for better working conditions. And since they operate on society’s fringes, they are unattended to – even as many of them fall prey to substance abuse to cope with the pressures of work. The least we should expect from government is to take up the cudgels for the voiceless, and ensure that BPO workers don’t end up with shortened productive life.

It may be that the government realized it had overreached its powers, which is why, so far, the Eid’l Fitr holiday doesn’t carry an exemption for any industry. But as all too often has been the case, a dangerous precedent has been set. –Philippine Daily Inquirer