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