20 ‘endo’ firms tagged

The Department of Labor and Employment released on Monday a list of top 20 companies that engaged in labor-only contracting, depriving its employees of security of tenure.

Jollibee Foods Corp., Dole Philippines Inc. and PLDT Inc. topped the list of businesses that the labor department inspected over the last two years and found to be engaged in labor-only contracting.

The three companies were on a list of 3,377 submitted to Malacañang.

The labor department also issued Department Order No. 174, prohibiting labor-only contracting, which the order defined as treating workers as mere “recruits” to “circumvent the right of workers to security of tenure.”

The top 20 companies on the list employ at least 224,000 contractual workers.

Reasonable time

On Monday, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said the department was giving the companies “reasonable time” to regularize the workers but expected at least 10 percent of the firms’ workforce to be regularized.

Bello said he submitted a list of violators to President Duterte “not to put them in a bad light.”

“We are not doing this to fight management,” Bello said.

As of May 11, data showed that a total of 176,286 workers had already been regularized.

From June 2016 to April this year, the labor department managed to inspect only 99,526 companies out of at least 900,000 establishments nationwide.

Bello attributed this to lack of inspectors. The department, he said, has only 574 inspectors.