Caught in the crossfire

In one of the posh, high end villages in Quezon City, the majority Board members of the homeowners association and some residents backing them up seem to have already made up their minds to terminate the services of the Village Manager even without valid legal grounds. They have taken sides in a quarrel between two village neighbors and they perceived the village manager as taking the side contrary to theirs. First they entertained the baseless complaint of some residents asking for the manager’s dismissal. When their counsel said that the complaint has no legal basis, they next told her just to resign purportedly for loss of confidence believing that she would accept their offer of payment of all benefits. When she refused as it would amount to an admission of guilt and when their counsel once more advised them that loss of confidence must also be based on some reasons duly proven, another complaint was filed against her this time by some subordinates allegedly for abuse of power and dishonesty. After the manager refuted the charges, the Board itself conducted the investigation during which another employee rather than the manager herself was implicated by the complainants for the alleged dishonesty. The investigation ended with a preventive suspension of both the manager, who was charged but not implicated and the employee, who was implicated but not charged for said acts of dishonesty.

Thereafter the files of the suspended employee was dug up for past infractions that have already been penalized or allowed to go unpunished. So as not to appear like they are engaged in a witch hunt the files of two other co-employees were also dug up for past infractions of tardiness. Then the suspended employee was told to return to work with another memo awaiting her and asking her to explain her past infractions. Such past infractions are again being used as grounds for disciplinary actions under recently promulgated rules which the Manager should have supposedly carried out but did not. Thus the manager and three employees (instead of only one) now face the prospect of possible dismissals, the employees for past tardiness already punished or left unsanctioned and the manager for not dismissing the employees due to such tardiness, a power that, under the By-Laws, only the President can exercise.

Compounding their errors, the majority Board threatened the suspended employee with dismissal for abandonment of work after illegally preventing her from working and after she was already forced to seek redress from the proper government body precisely because of their unfair and unjust acts. Thus in their headlong rush to fire the manager for some perceived sins against them, the majority Board has not only exposed the entire Association to liability but has also unnecessarily dragged and caused injury to other innocent long serving employees caught in the cross fire.

Maybe these board members should be reminded of the long established principle that an employer’s power to discipline its workers may not be exercised in an arbitrary manner as to erode the constitutional guarantee of security of tenure (HSBC vs. NLRC 260 SCRA 49). They should also know that if employees have already been penalized for past infractions or if they have not been initially penalized with the proper sanctions for previous offenses, such offenses cannot be accumulated and used as grounds to penalize them with heavier punishments like outright dismissal from service (Del Monte vs. NLRC, 287 SCRA 71). In this cited case, the Supreme Court also has ruled that for abandonment to be a valid ground for dismissal, the employer must show a clear and deliberate intent on the part of the employee to discontinue employment by certain unequivocal and overt acts from which such intent can be inferred. The Court said that the filing by the employee questioning the employer’s actions against her involving her employment clearly proves the lack of intent to abandon her job.

Over and above the legal issues involved in this village imbroglio, the Village Directors of this particular village in Quezon City should perhaps realize and accept that it is hard to be objective and fair and to act with justice, observe honesty and good faith if one takes side in favor of, and/or against one of the bitterly quarreling village neighbors. This is a moral lesson that can be learned only by swallowing an enormous amount of pride which admittedly is very painful to do. So heaven help that small and once relatively peaceful village.

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