Labor groups welcome scrapping of Ecop deal

Workers’ groups on Friday said Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III should not blame them for his agency’s bungled regularization deal with employers, even as they pointed out that if they were indeed sincere in regularizing their employees, they would have already done so without any agreement with the government.

Voluntary regularization

The Nagkaisa labor coalition said that if the three-year voluntary regularization program, which was supposed to be signed by the Department of Labor and Employment (Dole) and the Employers Confederation of the Philippines (Ecop) last month pushed through, it would have provided employers the means to “evade the law” and to keep majority of their workers “under [the] abusive contractualization” scheme.

Under the nixed agreement, Ecop’s more than 3,200 member establishments were to voluntarily regularize until 2022 around 40 percent of its workforce, or around 220,000 employees.

In exchange, they will be exempted from labor inspections for a three-year period, unless a complaint is filed against them.

Nagkaisa earlier assailed the deal as a “ploy to thwart” the passage of Senate Bill No. 1826, which will help put an end to the longstanding problem of contractualization.

Sonny Matula, the coalition’s chair, on Friday said that instead of providing workers security of tenure, it appears that “employers want to evade the law by maintaining 60 to 70 percent of their workers under abusive contractualization.”

“If employers are really sincere in complying with the law on security of tenure, why don’t they do so voluntarily and stop challenging compliance orders in courts? Why include immunity from inspection until the end of this administration?” Matula said.

On Thursday, Bello said the Dole scrapped its planned deal with the Ecop due to the “complaints” of the labor groups and its “threats” that he would be sued for corruption over the agreement.

Agreement not a ploy

He added that because of this, contractual employees may have to wait a little longer before they are regularized.

“They mistook the agreement as a ploy [against the passage] of a security of tenure bill. Since they complained against it, they should be the ones to explain to the workers. We will just have to let the unions realize their fault,” Bello said.

The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines reminded Bello though that if they did not protest his deal with the Ecop, he would have undermined the right of workers to security of tenure.