PLDT works to regain lost ground from DOLE order

MANILA, Philippines — Telco giant PLDT Inc. is moving to recover lost ground after its operations suffered from the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE)’s order on the provision of its services.

PLDT chief corporate services officer Ray Espinosa said the company is working on regaining the full strength of its operations after securing recently a favorable Court of Appeals (CA) ruling over DOLE regularization orders.

He said the company is restoring as quickly as possible the disrupted services in its operations.

“In respect to areas identified by the CA as not subject to labor only contracting, we would be in a good position to ramp up the services that we have lost because of the cease and desist order and to get us back to full strength by next month,” Espinosa said.

“The CA decision has enjoined the enforcement of the regularization orders of the DOLE and it has also actually set aside quite a number of significant findings of the DOLE when it comes to labor only contracting,” he added.

The CA has ruled to set aside DOLE regularization orders from covering the following contractual workers: janitorial services, messengerial and clerical services; information technology (IT) firms and services; IT support services, both hardware and software; applications development; back office support and office operations; business process outsourcing or call centers; sales; and medical, dental engineering and other professional services. 

“There are certain aspects though where the CA said that PLDT and DOLE regional should discuss and these are certain areas where we need to thresh out what these functions and activities really mean in terms of core versus noncore activities,” Espinosa said.

“But our job today has been to recover the lost ground in terms of service contractors and we are ramping up the capabilities of service contractors, both the old ones and new ones, so that we can come back to strength by next month,” he added.

PLDT earlier said DOLE’s order on the provision of the its services has posed an operational impact to the company.

The telco giant said DOLE has ordered 38 service contract providers of the company to stop providing services to PLDT.

DOLE had also previously ordered PLDT to regularize 7,344 workers from 38 of the company’s third-party service contractors through a series of orders.