Job order workers: The modern "aliping saguiguilids"

There is a great hypocrisy on the part of government, if we may say so, with all due respect, when it pressures private sector employees to pay minimum wages, all the statutory benefits and enroll their workers with the SSS, PhilHealth, Pap-Ibig, ECC and give them a set of truly just and humane conditions of work. And yet, government itself employs hundreds of thousands of lowly JOB ORDER WORKERS, who are not even called employees since their work arrangement explicitly denies employer-employee relationship. These people do not have benefits. If they get sick, they have no medicare benefits. They are not covered by the government's socialized housing program. If and when they are injured or die in the course of their employment, they are not covered by workmen's compensation. They will just lie there and die there.

These JOB ORDER WORKERS are much lower in category compared to the CASUALS and CONTRACTUALS. At least the latter have employer-employee relationships with the government. They have rights and benefits, albeit limited and often delayed. The J. O. workers do not even exist in the legal documents. The term does not exist in the Civil Service Law. Thus the Civil Service regulations neither cover nor protect them. They are simply outside the coverage of law. They are non-entities and, in the eyes of the law, they do not exist. And yet, government agencies do hire them by the hundreds and even by the thousands. Their labor is being used at the lowest cost in order to do the most difficult, dirty, dangerous, and degrading jobs. How dare the government say that they are not its employees.

It is thus a major irony which the DOLE, the CSC, and the Commission on Human Rights should look into, and even Congress itself, in aid of legislation. After all, the overall vision of the sovereign Filipino people, and the corresponding mandate upon government, as postulated in the Preamble of our Constitution, is to build a just and humane society. How can we pursue social justice and a humanistic society when right there in the echelons of our government bureaucracies, we are promoting discrimination in the workplace. This is plain and blatant discrimination because these job order workers perform their tasks, side by side with better paid, well-provided personnel who are, by the way, not necessarily more productive than these lowly workers. They are required to report on time, prepare time records, obey rules. And they are NOT deemed employees.

In the olden times, when slavery was not yet outlawed in our homeland, there were maharlikas, who were the freemen, the controlling elite and the wielders of both social and economic powers. But, on the other hand, there were two kinds of serfs or slaves: first, the ALIPING NAMAMAHAYS who were allowed to live in their own dwelling places, no matter how lowly. And second, the ALIPING SAGUIGUILIDS, the even lower kind of serfs who just slept around the houses of the masters and the maharlikas. They just wait to be called, to be ordered, to be sent on errands, to be directed to help in tribal battles and expeditions. They are the ones who carried heavy burdens, they even carried the children of the masters in hammocks and serve as their stepping stairs when masters wished to go higher in many journeys and travels along jungles and rivers.

Today, the job order workers in government are the nearest approximation of the aliping saguiguilids. They clean stinking toilets that not even the casuals and the contractuals would dare touch. They are asked to run and buy supplies and foods for the more privileged sectors among the civil service personnel.  [email protected]