If President Rodrigo Duterte does not act on it, the Security Of Tenure bill seeking to stop abuse in contractualization of workers will become a law.
The approved bicam version of the bill is now on the President’s table for his signature since June 27. The proposal may lapsed into law on July 27.
“End the endo” is one of the campaign promises of Duterte when he ran for public office. Endo is the short term for “end of contract”
Business groups urged the President to veto the bill for being redundant, citing laws that are already in place to protect workers from illegal contractualization.
“There are so many documents he has to sign, and at the same time, he has so many activities he has to attend to. Out-of-town trips, he visits one place, and then another place. Meanwhile, documents pile up. So sometimes, he doesn’t get to see all of them,” Presidential Spokesperson Sal Panelo said in a briefing in Malacañang.
Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello expressed his support for the bill saying it would greatly benefit Filipino workers.
Under the bill passed by both Congress, labor-only contracting will only be allowed if the job contractor merely supplies, recruits and places workers to a contractee, and when workers supplied to a contractee perform tasks that are listed by the industry to be directly related to the core business of the contractee, and when the contractee has direct control and supervision of the workers supplied by the contractor.
The SOT bill also classifies workers into four types: regular, probationary, project and seasonal.
Once the bill becomes law, project and seasonal workers will have the same rights as regular employees like the payment of minimum wage and social protection benefits for the duration of their employment.
The classification aims to curb practices that misclassify employees and prevent them from obtaining regular status, Sen. Joel Villanueva said in a recent statement.
The measure, however, does not totally ban labor only contracting. All contractors have to secure a license from the labor department to engage in job contracting.
Photo courtesy: Partido ng Manggagawa
