Reporting the Strikes Over “Endo”: Missing the Major Issues

THE SPATE of strikes by several labor unions in different companies has once more called attention to President Rodrigo Duterte’s promise to end labor contracting, or “endo” as it is popularly called.

CMFR monitored the reporting of ABS-CBN television network’s TV Patrol, GMA-7’s 24 Oras, TV-5’s Aksyon, the three broadsheets Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Philippines Star and the Manila Bulletin and their online sites from June 1 to August 9.

Social media were flooded with support for, as well as criticism of, the strikes by thousands of workers from Jollibee Food Corp., NutriAsia Inc. and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT), who protested the allegedly unfair labor practices of these companies.  But few of the protests made it to the mainstream media.

Workers’ strikes in companies such as Metro Pacific-Salim, an Indonesian conglomerate, were not even mentioned, despite the fact that the company controls  PLDT, and has Filipino businessman Manny Pangilinan for managing director and Chief Executive Officer in the Philippines (“MVP mourns passing of Salim”).

The workers on strike were uniformly appealing to the government to end labor contracting and to compel the firms to regularize their employment.  While the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) did declare some of the firms in violation of the law banning labor-only contracting, and ordered them to regularize their workforce, some, said striking workers, had not complied.

What the Labor Code Says

Article 106 of the Labor Code of the Philippines imposes several requirements on subcontracting companies. They must have the tools, equipment, machinery and work premises for their workers, among others, rather than merely providing labor for other companies, and should also provide services for more than one company. The workers hired should also be under their supervision. Only if the manpower-providing company meets all these conditions can their operations be considered legal.

In their defense, NutriAsia, PLDT and Jollibee claim that the companies from which they source workers meet these requirements, says an August 9 report from Inquirer.net. The workers from NutriAsia are originally from a subcontracting company focused on food packaging, B-Mirk Enterprises Corp., while PLDT hired their customer support and Information Technology employees through SPi Global. Hence, they cannot be regularized by the “principal companies” they work for, they being supposedly the employees of the subcontractors  (“Villanueva thinks NutriAsia, PLDT skirted labor code; urges Duterte to certify tenure bill”).

Article 109 of the labor code states that “every employer or indirect employer shall be held responsible with his contractor or subcontractor for any violation of any provision of this Code. For purposes of determining the extent of their civil liability under this Chapter, they shall be considered as direct employers.” If this is the case then companies like NutriAsia, PLDT and Jollibee as well as the subcontracting companies they have tapped can still be held liable for violating that provision.

The DOLE List

In addition to covering the strikes as a growing social issue, the media could very well have consulted the Labor Code to guide them in reporting such complex issues as labor contracting and regularization,  but did not.  Although some media organizations did report the claims of the workers and the counter-claims of the companies they worked for, their reports from June 1 until August 9 did not contain the much needed additional context of exactly what the laws say.

And yet the fact is that the DOLE has found some of the subcontracting companies in possible violation of the Code. Last May it submitted to the Office of the President a list of companies it suspected of engaging in labor-only contracting. The list contained 3,377 out of 99,526 inspected companies. According to an August 4 report in the Philippine Star, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said that the firms engaging in labor-only contracting have decreased since the list was published, but DOLE’s labor law compliance officers are still inspecting the subcontractors that are still operating.