After Duterte signed the PO, 20 companies suspected of practicing Endo were identified and asked to regularize employees with fixed contracts. But instead of hiring full-time employees, according to government policy, several of the country`s largest companies chose to lay off about 200,000 workers, according to Ariel Casilao, who represented the pro-worker anakpawis group in Congress. “Workers have long been fighting to end contracting, even after a first presidential veto in 2019, only to now face another watered-down version that will further betray their hopes,” he told VICE World News. The regular employee enjoys many rights that represent costs to the company that go beyond the calculation of the regular salary according to labor laws. Benefits for regular employees are starting to increase from what could be considered a competitive wage rate – the rate at which many workers are willing to accept a job. Over time, this led to the idea of temporary employees – as opposed to regular employees. These employees could be hired at the current minimum wage – which is already loaded with prescribed rates of pay and other wage demands – but not at the usual benefits of regular employees. This has led to the growing phenomenon of casual work as the main presence in the industrial and state labour market (Sicat, 2007). READ ALSO: Endo: Meaning, Contractualization, Invoice, Release, 555 Department Order number.
3 (2001 series) explicitly prohibits only employment contracts, defined as a type of employment, by which: This issue has been hotly debated recently because it was an election promise under the Duterte government. In 2017, the Ministry of Labour and Employment (DOLE) issued a decree to implement amendments to Articles 106 to 109 of the Labour Code declaring pure purchasing or subcontracting illegal. In his veto message, President Rodrigo Duterte said the proposed law “excessively expands the scope and definition of prohibited employment contracts and effectively prohibits forms of contracting that are not particularly unfavorable to the workers concerned.” We should promote labour mobility instead of forcing companies to hire them for life,” he added. In September 2018, Duterte confirmed that the Security of Tenure Bill, a bill against contracting, was urgent. For a while, this assured workers that the president “remained faithful” to his promise to end Endo. Under the bill, all employees, with the exception of those defined in trial, seasonal or project jobs, would be considered “regular.” But in 2019, Duterte acknowledged that this would “put capital and management in an incredibly difficult position with detrimental consequences for Filipino workers in the long run,” and eventually vetoed the bill after companies said it would be too difficult to follow. A 2016 study published by the Philippine Institute of Development Studies (PIDS) found that ending contracting would be about 30 to 40 percent more expensive for companies. In 2017, DOLE commissioned PLDT to regularize nearly 9,000 employees. This order was issued after DOLE found that many of PLDT`s contract agencies had violated the labor laws of the Philippines.
[9] Several authorities have denied their workers the rights enshrined in the Philippine Labor Code, such as the 13-month wage. PLDT appealed to the Ministry of Labour to reconsider this decision, but it was rejected in January 2018 when Labour Minister Silvestre Bello III said that “his office had found no reason to rescind the order”. However, some contract agencies turned out to be legal and the number of employees who needed to be regularized increased from nearly 9,000 to about 8,000 employees. DOLE also asked PLDT to pay PHP66 million in unpaid services. [10] The director of the Ecumenical Institute for Labour Education and Research, Rochelle Porras, said the next president should offer workers “greater representation” in labour law negotiations. After the change of power of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo`s 10-year reign, the benigno Aquino III administration began. Order 18 of the DOLE department was revised and led to a new and improved version of itself with the publication of order 18-A of the DOLE department. At this point, DOLE aggressively restricted and regulated the contractual practice of agencies, so it seemed that the norm was not contractualization, while regularization was the exception. “If these factors are not eliminated, the problem of contracting will not end, law or no law,” he said in a Viber message. Work conditioning, also known as “termination of contract” or endorsement, deprives workers of a path to permanent employment through five-month contracts. Employees must obtain permanent status after six months.
The pandemic has been made even more feasible by contracting, as companies are able to reduce losses, thus bearing much of the risk for workers, as standard work uses more telecommunications and virtual communications. Establishing an anti-endo law is like taking a step against the wave of the market,” he said in an email to BusinessWorld. Endocontracturalization is a practice in which employees are hired for a short period of time before being fired. Often, you are hired in this system for less than six months. Employees under this form of agreement are dismissed or transferred to other companies before the deadline expires. In this way, it becomes almost impossible for them to file claims for regularization. During his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, one of Rodrigo Duterte`s promises was to phase out contracting and improve work in the Philippines. .
