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SPECIAL
REPORT
FIRING
SEASON
Massive Government Job Cuts Seen Early Next
Year
Unless President Arroyo completely backtracks from her earlier announced
proposal to abolish some 14 government offices, more than 10,000 government
employees will find themselves out of work early next year.
BY
FELICISIMO MANALANSAN
IBON Features/Reposted by Bulatlat.com
Unless President Arroyo completely backtracks from her earlier announced
proposal to abolish some 14 government offices, more than 10,000 government
employees will find themselves out of work early next year.
Courage, the mother organization of employees unions in different government
offices nationwide, however, fears there could be more as a result of government's
relentless drive to privatize most of the 1.5-million strong civilian
bureaucracy doing vital social services to the country's 80 million population.
Meantime, in the wake of the government breaching its targeted P130 billion
budget deficit earlier on in July, Arroyo mandated all government agencies to do
their own privatization to aid in plugging a widening budgetary shortfall,
further fueling speculations that massive job cuts are in the offing for
millions of workers in the public sector.
From Abolition to Deactivation
President Arroyo, saying the government stands to
save about P1.6 billion next year from her proposal, justified the abolition of
the 14 government office that include the National Printing Office (NPO).
Apparently realizing its error in calling for the abolition of these offices,
some of which were created by law, Malacaņang changed tactic. From abolition,
it now calls for their deactivation, while claiming that the president has the
power to order a streamlining of a bloated government bureaucracy.
But employees to be affected by the government's streamlining efforts see their
fate not changing with the government's change of plan or justification for its
plan.
According to Mario Adarlo, president of the NPO Workers Association (NPOWA), it
was the same tactic that saw the abolition of the Department of Finance's
Economic Intelligence Information Bureau (EIIB) in 2000.
Some 1,250 EIIB employees were put out of work in what started as a deactivation
of the anti-smuggling government unit after it earned the ire of then President
Estrada whose operatives allegedly intercepted smuggled logs belonging to
someone close to the now jailed president.
Up
to December
Beleaguered government employees only see themselves
having to work until December this year.
According to Adarlo, Congressman Rolando Andaya, chair of the House
Appropriations Committee, told him and NPOWA's 615 members that Malacaņang
specifically instructed him to withhold appropriations for the NPO and the 13
other government offices up for deactivation, including the Telecommunications
Office, which employs 5,400 personnel.
Threatened, Adarlo says NPO's employees have been holding daily mass actions in
front of the NPO's plant since they were informed of government's plan last
August 20. They have likewise sought the audience of Senate and House leaders
where they have been attending sessions deliberating their plight and that of
other government employees.
Cause
for Agitation
There is a cause for agitation for Courage's more
than 300,000 members. According to Courage President Ferdinand Gaite, government
employees source of living is now under attack from the government itself.
If there is a massacre of jobs in the private sector because of globalization,
we in the public sector are being systematically robbed of our right to security
of tenure because of the government's complicity with international capital
interests represented by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank,
Gaite says, adding, This, in furtherance of its strategic objective to privatize
the entire public service that, incidentally, the government has even now
minimally provided.
Aside from the Arroyo government's intention to force the early retirement of at
least 10,000 public servants, Gaite sees parallel moves throughout the
bureaucracy pointing towards massive job cuts that could affect tens to hundreds
of thousands government employees.
Gaite cites employees of various shelter agencies, including the National
Housing Authority (NHA), who may soon lose their jobs as a result of the
creation of a Department of Housing and Urban Development (DHUD).
The latter is premised on a law that has already passed by the House of
Representatives and is currently being deliberated in a joint House and Senate
bicameral conference committee. The law is seen to have far-reaching
consequences that primarily relegates to the private sector the provision of
governments basic housing services to the country's urban population.
Collectively, 7,000 employees from seven shelter agencies are opposing DHUD,
which is calculated not only to displace most of them but also to result in the
transfer of public housing projects to the profit-seeking interest of private
real estate business.
Gaite says the same thing might also soon happen to employees of the National
Food Authority (NFA). Most of NFA's 5,500 employees could be rendered redundant,
he says, with the government's planned rice import liberalization program in
compliance with an Asian Development Bank's $175 million Grains Sector
Development Loan.
Gaite enumerates other government agencies lined up for reorganization such as
the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), Bureau of Customs (BOC) and attached
agencies of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE).
Personnel of local government units, he adds, are now feeling the heat of
massive reorganization moves in the bureaucracy, while casual employees who for
years have been serving government are being eased out as well.
All these under a schematic implementation of government's privatization,
liberalization and deregulation policies. At the enticement of superprofits,
public service is being offered to the hands of local and foreign big capital.
President Arroyo would rather offer the future of hundreds of thousands of
public servants just to ensure that she will retain her post beyond 2004, Gaite
says.
Budget
Deficit
The Arroyo government, according to Gaite, is
accusing Courage of exaggerating government proposals to put order in the
bureaucracy.
Gaite, however, points out that it was Malacaņang that started it all when
President Arroyo arbitrarily announced the abolition of 14 government offices.
If it hadn t been for newspaper reports, Gaite further recalls, they wouldn t
even have known that the 14 named government offices were planned for
dissolution upon the recommendation of a recently formed Presidential Commission
on Effective Governance (PCEG).
The PCEG is reportedly composed of the secretaries of the Department of Budget
and Management, Civil Service Commission, Department of Finance, and other
government institutions.
According to Andaya, Gaite says, the PCEG came up with a list of the 14 offices
shortly after the president asked it to conduct a study on how to bring down the
budget deficit.
Explains Gaite, The government is trying to make it appear that it is the
bureaucracy that is the cause of the government's yawning budget deficit. What
the PCEG fails to consider, however, is that it is the government's highly paid
bureaucrats who further add to the government's budget deficit woes.
More importantly, it is not government's allocations for its civilian offices
which are even earning revenues for the government - that eat up its budget but
the gargantuan allocations being put to unproductive sectors like the military
and foreign debt servicing, he adds.
Arroyo's
Strategic Objective
President Arroyo, in defending her decision to have
the NPO abolished, pointed to a World Bank fund for a generous early retirement
for NPO workers.
The strategic thing there is that the World Bank has funding for a generous
early retirement, which will not be charged to the budget deficit, Arroyo was
quoted as saying in a major newspaper last August.
The same newspaper also mentions Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye, under whose
office the NPO is attached, appealing the planned abolition of NPO, which was
created by Philippine Commission Act 296 of 1901, and later through Executive
Order 295 under the so-called Freedom Constitution of former President Aquino.
Gaite, on the other hand, scoffs at what Arroyo calls strategic.
When you say strategic, that means long term. But I don't see anything strategic
(with NPO abolition). Unless if it really has something to do with 2004, he
says.
The president has been severely criticized for trying to abolish the NPO a
revenue-generating government unit that its union officers claim has
consistently saved an average of P100 million annually for the treasury in order
to prepare her electoral victory for the 2004 polls through massive cheating.
Senator Tessie Aquino-Oreta an opposition senator has commented that the
administration may have deliberately floated the idea of abolishing 14
government offices as a smokescreen for the NPO abolition.
The NPO prints election paraphernalia like ballots and election returns. Its
abolition, critics point out, will pave the way for the printing of such
materials by a semi-private firm controlled by the president's close allies.
A stone's throw from the NPO plant in EDSA is the Asian Productivity
Organization (APO) Production Unit, which NPOWA's Adarlo is accusing of
encroaching upon NPO's exclusive functions and clientele. Over the past two
years, he says, APO has been aggressively taking over government printing jobs
previously handled by the NPO.
According to documents furnished by Adarlo to IBON Features, APO is a
government-owned corporation created through a Memorandum of Agreement between
the government and APO during the Marcos regime. While those sitting in APO's
governing board are government appointees, its personnel are not government
employees as they are governed not by the Civil Service Law but by the Labor
Code.
Saddled by a P700 million and P15 million loans to the Philippine National Bank
and Land Bank of the Philippines, respectively, the APO has been put under the
Asset Privatization Trust in 1989. In December 2000, then President Estrada
transferred it to the Office of the Press Secretary, pending its final
disposition.
APO last remitted to the national treasury an aggregate amount of P271,389.71 in
1989.
Sitting in the board of APO is known Arroyo media publicist, Manila Times
publisher Dante Ang, while its chairman of the board, Renato Velasco, is also
the director general of the Philippine Information Agency, also under the office
of the Press Secretary.
Gaite likewise sees a sinister motive behind the proposed abolition of the
DOTC's Telecommunications Office and the DFA's Commission on Filipino Overseas.
The former, he notes, performs a crucial role in transmitting election returns,
while the latter directly oversees migrant Filipino workers, amid on-going
congressional moves to pass an absentee voting bill for Filipino contract
workers abroad.
W
orld Bank
While
doubting whether there is really a World Bank fund for the early retirement of
government employees to be laid off, Gaite is enraged that the government is
ready to sacrifice its employees for its own self-interest.
The truth is out. The government is again going to use public servants to pay
off its debts, he says.
Gaite says members of Courage have always known that behind such plans of
reorganizing and streamlining the bureaucracy are foreign financial institutions
like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Gaite says a 1998 World Bank Memorandum on Economic and Financial Policies
listed as number one among key reform areas it required of the then Estrada
administration is advancing the reengineering of the core government
bureaucracy.
He adds that the World Bank memorandum is part of a $1.4 billion Public Sector
Reform Loan and that the Arroyo government's moves are obviously calculated to
bring about the release of the next tranche of the said loan.
Asked how Courage sees the World Bank's role in the administration's moves
affecting government employees security of tenure, Gaite says that like the rest
of the Filipino people, Courage is involved in a militant protest movement
exposing and opposing the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization
as instruments conniving with the powers-that-be that have traditionally been
anti-worker and anti-Filipino .
He says that as part of Courage's organizing thrust among government employees,
they are engaged in a vigorous education movement explaining the role of those
foreigninstitutions in perpetuating unjust conditions in Philippine society.
Gaite also points out that as part of Courage's organizing moves in response to
renewed threats on government's employees job security, a new alliance called Tanggol
Trabaho (Defend Jobs) has been launched by Courage among its members, as
well as among other workers in the public sector. IBON Features/Bulatlat.com
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