By ALDWIN G. QUITASOL
www.nordis.net

“The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you’re on the job.” — Slappy White

Regular employee – a permanent worker who has earned his status after working under one employer for over five months. According to the labor law, a worker should be made a permanent employee of a company once he finishes a five-month probationary period. Therefore he is entitled to a wage based on his job description and skill. The company has the responsibility and obligation to pay his Social Security Insurance and other stipulated benefits.

A regular employee has the democratic right to join a workers’ association or union. In the union, he will be represented in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). In the CBA, the workers’ economic rights as well as non-monetary benefits will be properly addressed depending if the union will be true to its members or sadly run by greedy leaders who do not know the proper ethics of genuine unionism. His political rights are upheld so is his security of tenure.

When a regular worker retire, he is also legally entitled to be paid his separation benefits and rewards.

Contractual employee – a temporary worker who has to endure working in a supervised environment. He is a probationary employee who has to work for a definite period of working days in order to gain his permanent status ideally. But at present, most of contractual workers in the country cannot be regularized as maintaining such is expensive to the eyes of the capitalists.

The company has no obligation to pay the contractual worker’s insurance. As a probationary employee, he is always at the brink of sudden loss of job once the company he is working for wishes. Once his contract has ended, the company has no responsibility to pay for his separation benefits.

They cannot join unions until they did not complete the requirement of joining such, to be regular workers.

Why are there so many contractual now? Because they are cheaper than the regular ones. And most companies like to hire them while thinking of ways of how to get rid of the regular ones and fire them legally.

Once majority of their workers are contractual, they have no problem as there will be no unions after all as having such is a pain to their asses.

Why can’t the government address the plague of contractualization? Simple, how can a government address such a problem when most of its employees are considered contractual or casuals even if they have rendered more than five years in public service?

Mechanization/Modernization – employing modern equipments or technology to make the job faster and bigger. This is being enrolled by companies into their production to go within the flow of competition in the trade world. This is also being integrated into government agencies and services.

The result – faster ways of production at the same time cheaper as it will only require few people to operate. So what is the use of hiring more workers much more of maintaining regular employees when a machine can do the job? Some companies will just declare that they are bankrupt so they have to cut-cost the production, retrench the workers.

In a social order where the welfare of the majority is priority, mechanization as part of modernization is good as the workers are assured that they will not lose their job. And contractualization is erased from the new world order. # nordis.net

By REV. LUNA DINGAYAN
www.nordis.net

“God is going to judge everything we do, whether good or bad, even things done in secret.” — Ecclesiastes 12:13

IIRC Report

The report of the Incident Investigation Review Committee (IIRC) chaired by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Secretary Leila de Lima on the botched hostage crisis is now partially disclosed to the public. Names of government and police officials responsible were mentioned. In their report the IIRC recommends the filing of administrative and criminal charges against the officials concerned. But instead of humbly accepting their involvement in the tragedy, each one reacted with various forms of defense mechanisms.

We are not yet sure how the investigation will come to an end and serve the cause of justice for the innocent victims. Hopefully, it would not be like the countless investigations in the past that ended up as mere investigations. September 21 reminds us of the many similar tragedies in the Martial Law years: the killings of innocent victims by the instruments of the state. Investigations were conducted but nothing happened, not even a report. It’s good we have now, at least, a partial IIRC Report.

Correlation of Action and Destiny

People in the Old Testament believed in the correlation of action and destiny. What we are today is the product of our actions yesterday; what we do today determines our future destiny. The reason why today we resolve conflicts by the barrel of the gun is because that is what Martial Law, whether it be declared like the time of Marcos or undeclared like the time of Arroyo, has painfully taught us. The reason why today we do not value human beings more than anything else is because in the past people are just killed like chickens.

There is now a Martial Law culture within us as a people that needs to be transformed, if we would like to restore our value for human life and our sense of justice. And this can be done by making those responsible for crimes against innocent people, today and in the past, answer for what they have done.

No One can Escape

Some people easily kill their fellow human beings because they thought they could do away with it with all the money in their pockets and the power in their hands. Surely, they might be able to escape the courts of the land, but certainly they cannot escape the court of the Divine. The Book of Ecclesiastes says, “God is going to judge everything we do, whether good or bad, even things done in secret” (Ecclesiastes 12:14).

This was the experience of King David (cf. 2 Samuel 11). He was considered the greatest king of Israel, but he was not without fault. He took Bathsheba, the beautiful wife of his soldier Uriah. Bathsheba became pregnant. King David tried to cover up his adulterous activity using various strategies, including Uriah’s death in the battlefield. King David thought that no one knew what he did. He never thought that God had seen everything that happened.

And so, God sent Prophet Nathan to confront the King. David painfully realized the sins he committed and he had to suffer the various consequences of his sinful acts. His reign deteriorated, his first son with Bathsheba died, his son Absalom staged a coup and he was killed in the process, one of his daughters was raped by his son with another wife, and his rapist son was also killed by the brother of his raped daughter. All these things happened before King David’s eyes.

Leaders today, as in the past, cannot escape Divine judgment. God requires not only our public life, but also our personal life, not only what we do in the open, but also what we have done in secret. In the fullness of time, God will make sure that what we reap is what we sow. # nordis.net