Adjusting government office hours

I have had the privilege of being a part of a team providing service for the Department of the Interior and Local Government. Since 2001, we have been conducting seminars for local government officers, specially within the few months following the election of new local officials. In those sessions, I always share with my audience ideas on local legislation. Participants and resource persons agree that enacting ordinances is an attempt to solve a nagging problem or to anticipate a situation or to approximate a vision.

My constant urging is for local legislators to investigate personalities in order to gather relevant facts and then research for applicable laws and jurisprudence before making the outline of a proposed measure. I call the product of this process as a "fact sheet". Let me illustrate.

Case 1. Every morning thousands upon thousands of workers awake to the challenges of a new day. Alvin Toffler says that this is our regimen. We are taught and trained to rise early, hurry in doing our chores and rush towards catching the early jeeps and be in time for work at eight in the morning.

We ignore the fact that we rise early, not so much for the things we need to do at home because, truth to tell, we just take them for granted, but so that we can join the mainstream of commuters, between seven and eight of the clock, in going to our work. Deep in our subconscious mind lingers the importance of not being late for work.

Case 2. An owner of a small residential land who works as a cashier of a bank goes to the city hall to get a tax clearance. A mother who is employed as a sales supervisor of a mall visits the civil registrar's office to obtain a certificate of live birth for a son's school documentation. And an ordinary waitress files a request for a health certificate as a requisite for her continued employment.

These are but three of the many situations when a resident has to deal with various government offices. Yet, in all of these three cases, they have to be absent from work in order to obtain needed documents. It is worse if they have to go back, many times more, to the offices because either their papers have not yet been processed or a bureaucratic head has yet to sign their documents.

From these two cases we discern the problem. Since government offices open only at from eight in the morning to 12 noon and one to five o'clock in the afternoon, which are about the same time private business offices open their doors to customers and clients, we can see that those people working in the private sector cannot transact government business without absenting themselves from their work.

We know the obvious solution. Government offices may (and should) be opened at an early morning hour like six o'clock and close at a still later time like seven o'clock in the evening. Persons who have to deal with government offices can go there either before they punch their own cards in their own workstations or after their hours of duty.

Rather than keep their entire force of workers for eight hours daily in the service of the public, government heads of offices can spread their personnel for 12 hours. A government office that opens its doors at six o'clock in the morning or serves the public until seven o'clock in the evening, is surely going to be an experiment. But I can bet that it will produce positive results. Employees in private enterprises do not anymore have to miss their work if only to get some papers from government.

Of course, from this brief fact sheet, the members of our sanggunian can expand their research. They have the tools and resources to validate my observation. Most of all, it is their work to look for solutions to this discomfort. I am referring to the discomfiture of private individuals who have to be absent from work if only to deal with government. Or our councilors can produce a legislative plan that adjusts government hours and allows such transactions minus the present attendant hassle.

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