Why deprive JOs and other workers of their dignity?

For all its supposed grasp and knowhow of rules, guidelines and other technicalities, it appears that the Commission on Audit does not really know much of anything. In its crackdown on local governments for providing cash incentives and other bonuses to job order employees, barangay health workers, garbage collectors and other lowly employees, it relies mainly on descriptions that exist only on paper but are far from what the reality is on the ground.

But then, what can one expect from a COA that is mainly office-bound and seldom makes the rounds to see and find out things for itself. To the COA that derives wisdom only from what is on paper, job order employees, barangay health workers, garbage collectors (euphemistically called clean and green workers), janitors and other employees deserve almost nothing because they do not even enjoy employer-employee relationships with the local governments they work for. How cruel naman.

What the COA does not know, because it does not go around to check on things but relies only on what it reads in its rule books, is that the entire government can be driven to near collapse without the services of these job order employees, these barangay health workers, these garbage collectors, these nutritionists, these barangay public safety officers.

For the information of the COA, the government's centerpiece program of providing cash doleouts to the poor, variously called 4Ps or CCT or whatever, and for which billions of pesos have been allocated yearly, would not be as successful as government touts it to be had it not been for job order employees working as barangay health workers and nutritionists who make sure that the beneficiaries comply with the health requirements under the program. Dinky Soliman cannot do it by herself.

Another centerpiece program of government, the controversial RH Law, would not have been implemented as successfully without, again, the services of job order employees working in the barangays as health workers. Enrique Ona cannot do it by himself. Both the DSWD and the DOH do not have the manpower to implement their own programs. So they rely on the lowly workers that the COA does not even consider worthy of any human dignity to be bestowed an employer-employee relationship.

Only last September, the Department of Health trumpeted to the whole world and even to high heavens its massive Ligtas Tigdas nationwide anti-measles campaign. For the whole of that month, the government sought to achieve a 100 percent immunization rate of every child up to four years of age in the entire country. So gung-ho was government about the campaign that after it ended, it took out full-page advertisements in the newspapers to announce the results by city and province.

But who do you think made sure that the Ligtas Tigdas program of government was the howling success that it was? Do not ask the COA because it does not know. But for the information of the COA, it was the lowly job order employees working in the barangays as health workers who not only waited for mothers and their children to come to the barangay halls but actually went house-to-house in the communities to make sure everyone was immunized according to the government's wishes.

And yet the COA does not consider these lowly employees worthy of any human dignity to even be accorded employer-employee status that they might enjoy a little bonus as incentive every once in a while. To the COA, these lowly citizens (I hope the COA will acknowledge their citizenship) are not even worth a mere tshirt for their contribution to nation-building, if the COA even recognizes that.

By a long shot that COA might be interested to know, the Ligtas Tigdas program had tshirts for those who took part in it or carried it out. But many of the tshirts never reached the job order employees working in the barangays as health workers, probably for the same reason that they are now being made to reimburse any bonuses they might have received over the years -- because they do not enjoy employer-employee status.

These lowly workers which the COA is discriminating against are not even paid the minimum wage which the very government they work for mandates every now and then with much fanfare and is supposed to enforce with the stern and strict authority of a good and provident father. Many of these job order employees working as barangay health workers are real professionals, many of them licensed nurses and midwives, forced by circumstance to find employment any which way they can.

Yet these duly licensed professionals suffer below minimum wages paid by the very government that mandates and enforces minimum wages because they are just job order employees who do not enjoy employer-employee relationships with their government, the same government that steals money from its people through various scams like the PDAF and the DAP, with the COA looking mostly the other way unless the perpetrators happen to be the enemies of their favorite president.

According to the COA, these lowly workers need to reimburse the bonuses and cash incentives they have received over the years because they do not deserve these little extras, not having any employer-employee relationship with government. In effect, not only are these lowly workers being underpaid, they are even made to give back the little they have been given.

Yet, the COA simply folds its arms and looks away when local governments give senior citizens and single parents huge cash gifts. Not that I have anything against senior citizens and single parents, but hey, these people do not have employer-employee relationships with government as well. At least, with the lowly workers like job order employees, they are doing something for the government, even if the COA is clueless about that.

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