Sonny Matula, president of the Federation of Free Workers (Photo from his Facebook account)
MANILA, Philippines — A workers’ group on Wednesday heavily criticized the move of the House of Representatives to concur with the Senate’s version of a bill seeking to end illegal labor contractualization.
In a statement, Sonny Matula, president of the Federation of Free Workers (FFW), asked the House to “reconsider the revival of its proposal and harmonize the same with the [S]enate version at the bicameral conference committee level.”
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the manipulation in the House of Representatives adopting Senate Bill (SB) 1826 or Security of Tenure (SOT) bill without considering the progressive provisions of House Bill (HB) 6908 which trade unions have been advocating for in the House for 21 years now,” Matula said.
While the labor group earlier welcomed SB 1826, Matula pointed out that the proposal would “not be effective to address abusive contractualization” without the “strong provisions” of the House version.
The House earlier adopted the Senate version of the measure to replace HB 6908, which eliminates the need for a bicameral conference committee to reconcile the two versions.
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“Without going thru a bicameral conference and without giving notice to the members of the House Labor Committee, the House Labor Committee chair killed with alacrity HB 6908 and substituted it with SB 1826,” Matula said.
“We cannot put ‘flesh and blood’ to security of tenure with the Senate version alone thereby killing the House version,” he added. “Otherwise, we will just be putting ‘flesh’ without ‘blood’ to the malnourished constitutional right to security of tenure.”
Matula noted that the House provisions — like the provision on prohibiting fixed-term employment or the provision on the specific fine of P30,000 for each person who violates the law — have been “ignored and disregarded with alacrity by the House that drafted these progressive provisions.”
“The regressive provision of the [S]enate on solidarity liability must be corrected,” the labor leader said.
“Limiting those who are solidarily liable to Book III only instead of all existing provisions of the Labor Code does not give justice to the principle that ‘those who have less in life must be given more in law,’” he added.
Matula also slammed “some decision makers” who he said “killed the process in the bicameral committee conference to prevent the harmonization of the law to answer the call of workers to security of tenure.”
“This is not the law that the trade unions and the workers envision for many many years!” he said.
The proposed law aims to amend the Labor Code to prohibit labor-only contracting — that is, when a job contractor with no substantial capital or investment merely supplies, recruits, and places workers to a contractee.
The Senate and the House would need only to ratify the final version of the proposed measure before transmitting it to President Rodrigo Duterte for his signature.
(Editor: Alexander T. Magno)