Palace defends veto on nurses’ minimum pay

MANILA, Philippines - Malacañang yesterday defended President Aquino’s decision to veto the bill providing for a minimum base pay for nurses.

Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr. said the government must be fair to all workers and that the nurses’ appeal for higher wages, along with teachers and other employees, had been addressed through performance-based compensation.

“They can have their desired bigger compensation if they perform their jobs well,” he said.

Labor recruiters said they were expecting more Filipino nurses to seek employment abroad after Aquino vetoed a bill that would have increased the basic salary of local nurses to Salary Grade 15 or P26,000 per month.  

Coloma, however, said the government had actually raised the minimum base pay for entry-level nurses through Executive Order No. 201.

Coloma also emphasized that nurses who could work abroad were those with experience and specialization, the reason why the government increased the local nurses’ base pay as they would need the training to get the jobs here and abroad with much higher compensation.

Under the EO, the total guaranteed annual compensation of nurses has been raised from P228,924 to P344,074.

This is apart from other benefits and allowances nurses receive, including those under the Magna Carta of Public Health.

Incoming Department of Health secretary Paulyn Jean Ubial said the Duterte administration will look into the bill vetoed by Aquino.

“We will study. We don’t know the context why the bill has been vetoed.  I just don’t want to say with finality that we will re-file it as it is. We have to study,” she said.

Ubial said they would be organizing stakeholders’ consultation to study the proposed law and its impact on the health community.

Ubial also said the Duterte administration is “supportive of actually providing better benefits and compensations to all health workers.”

The Philippine Nurses Association (PNA) and the Filipino Nurses United (FNU) called on incoming president Rodrigo Duterte to reconsider filing the bill.

“We are calling on president-elect Duterte to take a fresh look at our bill and make it as a priority legislative agenda. Health is a priority and should be regarded as key to economic development,” former PNA president Mila Delia Llanes said.

For his part, FNU spokesman Jossel Ebesate said they are hoping Duterte would also raise the nurses’ salaries, just like what he is planning to do with the policemen’s wages.

Ebesate claimed the “wage distortion” between nurses in government and private health facilities is high and should be addressed by the government.

He said Aquino’s action to junk the bill would only force local nurses to work abroad.

For its part, the party-list group Bayan Muna said it will re-file the bill in the incoming 17th Congress.

Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Zarate said Aquino has shown that he is “consistently anti-worker” by vetoing the bill.

“If there is a legacy the exiting Aquino presidency could claim is its consistent and unrelenting callousness against our working people and the poor. Even in his last acts as President, he is cruel as he is uncaring on the urgent demands and needs of our people,” Zarate said.

“When we filed the bill in the last Congress, Bayan Muna recognized the unjust salary and working conditions our government nurses have, who, in the flight of many of our nurses abroad to find greener pastures, become more and more overburdened. This is happening despite the number of nurses graduating year after year in our country,” he added.

Zarate noted that before the nurses’ bill, Aquino vetoed the Bayan Muna-authored measure that sought a P2,000 increase in the monthly pension of retired Social Security System members.

The vetoed bill for government nurses proposed to upgrade their pay level from the present Salary Grade 11, which provides for a basic monthly pay of P19,077 to P20,585, to Salary Grade 15 (P26,192 to 28,344) or by P7,115 to P7,759.

The lowest rates in the range are entry-level salaries, while the higher rates are for those who have been in the service for years. Each salary grade in the bureaucracy has eight steps that correspond to different salaries, depending on one’s length of service.

The authors of the vetoed bill had hoped that with the improvement of the pay for government nurses, private hospitals would be forced to increase the salaries of their own nursing staff.

There are reports that private hospitals are paying nurses monthly salaries as low as P5,000.

Zarate said the nurses’ pay hike bill was just a restatement of Republic Act 9173 or the Philippine Nursing Act of 2002.

The 2002 law already provides for Salary Grade 15 for nurses, but Aquino and Budget Secretary Florencio Abad have inexplicably consistently refuse to follow the law, he said.

Zarate added that he hoped the nurses’ pay hike bill would fare better under the Duterte administration.

Zarate noted that the incoming president’s partner, Honeylet Avanceña, is a nurse and in fact once practiced her profession abroad as an overseas Filipino worker. – With Sheila Crisostomo, Jess Diaz